Journalist Assistance helps record number in 2012
An increase in press freedom violations last year created a surge of need among journalists, driving a record number of assistance cases for CPJ’s Journalist Assistance Program in 2012. More than three-quarters of the 195 journalists who received support during the year came from East Africa and the Middle East and North Africa, reflecting the…
State-sponsored attacks: open season on online journalists
The last few weeks have offered the strongest indications yet that nation-states are using customized software to exploit security flaws on personal computers and consumer Internet services to spy on their users. The countries suspected include the United States, Israel, and China. Journalists should pay attention–not only because this is a growing story, but because…
Most censored nations each distort the Net in own way
One big reason for the Internet’s success is its role as a universal standard, interoperable across the world. The data packets that leave your computer in Botswana are the same as those which arrive in Barbados. The same is increasingly true of modern mobile networks. Standards are converging: You can use your phone, access an…
China not most censored, but may be most ambitious
China didn’t make the cut for our 10 most censored countries. While the Chinese Communist Party’s censorship apparatus is notorious, journalists and Internet users work hard to overcome the restrictions. Nations like Eritrea and North Korea lack that dynamism.
Assisting journalists forced to flee censorship
CPJ’s Journalist Assistance Program supports journalists who cannot be helped by advocacy alone. In 2011, we assisted 171 journalists worldwide. Almost a fourth came from countries that made CPJ’s Most Censored list. Eight journalists from Eritrea, five from Syria, six from Cuba, and a whopping 20 from Iran sought our help after being forced to…
Google+, real names and real problems
At the launch of Google+, Google’s attempt to create an integrated social network similar to Facebook, I wrote about the potential benefits and risks of the new service to journalists who use social media in dangerous circumstances. Despite early promises of relatively flexible terms of service at Google+, the early days of implementation were full…
Online publishers, developers sentenced to death in Iran
Politically-related Iranian prosecutions often take place in near secrecy, with unclear charges morphing and changing over time. It doesn’t get any easier to work out the motivations of prosecutors when the charges are connected to technology.
Defending the middle ground of online journalism
It’s easy to use polarizing descriptions of online news-gathering. It’s the domain of citizen journalists, blogging without pay and institutional support, or it’s a sector filled with the digital works of “mainstream media” facing financial worries and struggling to offer employees the protection they once provided. But there is a growing middle ground: trained reporters…
Farsi guides to the surveillance attack in Iran
As we’ve reported before, there’s strong evidence that forces with widespread access to Iran’s internet infrastructure have been engaged in large-scale surveillance of https traffic in July and August, certainly of Google traffic, and perhaps many more websites, including Facebook and Yahoo! If you used the Internet in Iran during this period you should, at…
Catching the Internet’s spies in Iran and elsewhere
In August, Google introduced a new, if rather obscure, security feature to its Chrome web browser, designed to be triggered only under extreme circumstances. If you were talking to Google’s servers using the web’s secure “https” protocol, your browser makes a number of checks to ensure that you are really talking to Google’s servers. Like…