“Bloggers Under Fire” Launched By EFF

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with Global Voices Online’s Threatened Voices project, announced a new project called Bloggers Under Fire. The initiative is aimed at putting the ...
“Bloggers Under Fire” Launched By EFF
Written by Chris Crum

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with Global Voices Online’s Threatened Voices project, announced a new project called Bloggers Under Fire. The initiative is aimed at putting the spotlight on threats Internet users are facing around the world.

The landing page for the project tracks instances of where bloggers and other web users have been threatened, arrested, arrested, or harmed.

This map, from the page illustrates:

(image)

It’s interactive if you actually go to the page.

The EFF’s Jillian York writes:

2011 was by many accounts ‘the year of the protester.’  From Tunisia to Oakland, activists took to the streets—and to social networks—to express themselves and their grievances.  But while many were successful in using online tools in their activism, others faced grave consequences.

So far, 2012 hasn’t been any easier.  Less than six weeks into the year, EFF has already documented nine cases of bloggers under fire: in Oman and South Korea;  Bahrain and China;ThailandIranVietnam; and Ethiopia.  And just this week, two more Iranian bloggers werearrested, a Saudi citizen was forced to flee his country after receiving death threats for content he’d posted on Twitter, and both an Indonesian and a Moroccan were detained for posts made on Facebook.  These additional cases mean that so far in 2012, fourteen netizens have been threatened for content posted online…and those are just the ones we know about.

“While our domestic work focuses on helping bloggers in the United States understand their legal rights, our international work focuses on the legal and bodily threats to Internet users in countries around the world,” the EFF says on the Bloggers Under Fire page.

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