A year of blogging, threats and silence
In its annual census of imprisoned journalists, CPJ data shows nearly half of the 179 held in jail in 2011 worked primarily online. Al Jazeera highlights some of the challenges facing online journalism in the Middle East and around the world in 2011.Click here for the full story.
Belarusian website Charter 97 attacked, shut down
It’s not unusual for Charter 97, a Belarusian pro-opposition news website, to be disrupted online. CPJ has documented intimidations, threats, and arrests against its staff members, the murder of its founder, and denial-of-service attacks against the website.
India struggles to cope with growing Internet penetration
As Internet penetration deepens, largely religiously and socially conservative India is struggling to cope with concerns about controversial web content and its easy accessibility to a vast population, all with little oversight. Local courts have become the launching point for some of the anti-Web offensives.
The press silenced, Nuevo Laredo tries to find voice
You don’t notice it at first. Not with the people seemingly moving as normal on the sidewalks and the happy recorded music blaring across the plaza in front of city hall to announce the annual cowboy parade. No, at first Nuevo Laredo looks like a regular border town, until the military armored car goes by…
Policing the Internet in India
Amid a raging debate on Internet freedom and censorship in India, members of the government met last week with a clutch of website operators, including representatives of Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. In a meeting scheduled to address a wider plan to leverage social media to empower the government, it’s unclear whether the touchy subject…
In China, real people vs. Internet minders
In the next three months, users of China’s microblog weibo.com — “weibo” is the generic Chinese term for Twitter-like platforms — run by the huge sina.com (the English site is here) news portal, entertainment and blogging site, will have to start providing their real-world identities to the site, instead of simply being able to register.…
Ríodoce attack shows need for denial-of-service defenses
A founder of Mexican news weekly Ríodoce, Javier Valdez Cárdenas, traveled to New York in November to receive CPJ’s International Press Freedom Award at our annual benefit dinner. No sooner had he returned to Mexico than Ríodoce’s website was thrown offline by a denial of service (DOS) attack, in which multiple computers are used to…
Syria detains blogger, press freedom advocate
New York, December 5, 2011–The Committee to Protect Journalists condemns the detention of journalist and press freedom campaigner Razan Ghazzawi and calls on Syrian authorities to immediately release her. CPJ also urges the government to end the routine harassment and detention of journalists and to make public the names of all detained journalists and any…