A select committee has called for more regulation and greater safety on the Internet. But politicians should be careful what they wish for, says Bill Thompson
Fools rush in where programmers fear to tread
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CATEGORY: Campaigns
Iran: bill proposed to extend death penalty to online crimes
A draft has been passed on its first reading by the Iranian parliament which proposes to apply the death penalty to bloggers and website editors who ‘promote corruption, prostitution or apostasy’. According to article 3 of the bill, judges will be...
Jordan restricts Internet cafés
The Jordanian ministry of the interior has announced increased restrictions on Internet cafés, which are widespread in the country’s cities. Internet café owners will be obliged to install cameras for the purpose of identifying customers. They will...
Iran: website editor arrested
Hassan Nobakhtian, the editor of conservative website Nosaki, was arrested on 25 February, despite having had no complaints brought against him. The arrest took place 11 days after Nosaki was banned by Tehran prosecutor-general Said Mortazavi....
Anti-censorship site shut down
Finnish blogger Matti Nikki is facing an investigation into whether he aided the distribution of child pornography. The anti-censorship campaigner's website, on which he published a list of over 1,500 websites that have been blocked by the Finnish...
Websites blocked in Yemen
On 19 January, three domestic news and opinion websites were blocked to users in Yemen by the government-owned Internet provider. The sites joined a list of at least five others that have been censored without any official explanation. News site...
Grooming for jihad
New proposals to limit extremist speech could have a significant chilling effect on the Internet, argues Bill Thompson Taking a leaf from its approach to prosecuting predatory paedophiles who use the Internet to establish contact with young people,...
New guidelines for combating campus extremism
In a move designed to tackle the threat of extremism on university campuses, the UK government issued updated anti-terrorism guidelines for academics on 22 January. The recommendations state that universities should have a clearly defined freedom...
Britain: Bloggers unite against intimidation
An unprecedented coalition of British bloggers has come together over the last two weeks to fight an assault on freedom of speech from Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov. Lawyers acting for the Uzbek billionaire, who recently bought a large stake in...
Extreme ignorance
While British newspapers were harrumphing about the Australian government banning Aboriginals from accessing pornography, they signally failed to notice that one of the 19 new offences announced in New Labour’s 54th criminal justice bill since it...
Petitions, letters, and press releases from Index on Censorship