Monday, September 17, 2007

FYI: Irrepressible Internet Campaign

Hi everyone:
I came across an interesting news release which led me to a couple of neat sites about combating Internet repression. This is part of the email press release about a Vietnamese journalist, Nguyen Vu Binh
Imagine being accused of espionage and jailed for something as simple as sending an email message. For many journalists in Vietnam and China, this nightmare scenario has become reality.

Nguyen Vu Binh was jailed in Vietnam in 2002 for writing and posting articles about democracy on the Internet and campaigning for human rights. But thanks to tireless work by Amnesty supporters like you, Vietnamese authorities freed Nguyen Vu Binh in June after serving over two-thirds of his seven-year prison term on baseless espionage charges. He has since been reunited with his wife and two daughters in Hanoi.

Amnesty International UK has a web page about internet repression includes video of Ethan Zuckerman of the site Global Voices: AIUK: Stop Internet Repression.
Amnesty's "Irrepressible.Info" campaign offers ways to help, including a call to bloggers to "Undermine censorship by publishing fragments of censored material on your side." From Irrepressible.Info:

Be irrepressible

Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Websites blocked. Search engines restricted. People imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information.

The Internet is a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. Governments – with the help of some of the biggest IT companies in the world – are cracking down on freedom of expression … learn more.

This might provide some useful leads and ideas for those of you contemplating a semester-long writing and research project on a related topic. Please feel free to click on the Comments link for this post to respond or ask questions.

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