BlackBerry Messenger has been cited as the main organisational tool for the London riots, with Tottenham MP David Lammy even suggesting it be shut down until order is restored. Research in Motion has had previous run-ins with the law in India, as Prashant Iyengar explained in this article for Index on Censorship magazine in June
State media in China and Iran have both offered their two cents in response to the riots that have swept the UK over the past three days.
A commentator at Communist Party mouthpiece, People’s Daily, opined that this sort of chaos is precisely the result of a lack of censorship of social networking websites:
The West have been talking about supporting internet freedom, and oppose other countries’ government to control this kind of websites, now we can say they are tasting the bitter fruit [of their complacency] and they can’t complain about it.
News agency Xinhua, remembering Beijing’s smooth staging of the 2008 Olympics, said:
After the riots, the image of London has been severely damaged, leaving the people sceptical and worried about the public security situation during the London Olympics.
Meanwhile, Press TV reported that Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast “urged the British government to order the police to stop their violent confrontation with the people.” He also “asked independent human rights organisations to investigate the killing in order to protect the civil rights and civil liberties.”
Journalist Natalia Radzina, who was beaten and imprisoned following last year’s disputed election, explains why she fled Belarus seeking political asylum
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The New Republic has published a piece online this week taking the US State Department to task for its seeming lack of urgency in doling out its internet freedom budget — and its choices over which tools that budget has so far been used to fund. Author Max Shulman argues that this reality is at odds with the image Hillary Clinton has portrayed to the world of the US as the benefactor of internet freedom fighters toiling away in repressive regimes. Writes Shulman:
“This is complicated, Clinton finds new ways to say with every speech, but we’re doing all the right things. Official U.S. policy unequivocally favors a “free and open Internet” and opposes repressive censorship regimes worldwide through the best available means.
“But, in reality, this isn’t exactly true. An examination of the State Department’s record of its 18-month-old Internet freedom agenda reveals significant failures, both in overall funding efforts and in the omission of vital tools from its approach to helping activists crack through the layers of censorship imposed by repressive regimes. Before democracy advocates abroad can truly take heart in Clinton’s words, the department needs to admit to past mistakes and adopt a truly comprehensive approach to addressing the issue.”
There has been bitter dispute among technologists and politicians in the US over the wisdom of relying too heavily on circumvention tools to open the internet, particularly in countries where dictators are prone to simply shutting the whole thing off. But Shulman argues that the State Department should be trying everything — “mesh networks and circumvention tools, training for activists and pressure on antidemocratic corporations” — even as it acknowledges no one strategy will solve the problem.
Read the full piece here.