Will Bahrain's censorship efforts run into the "cute cat theory"?

Posted By Evgeny Morozov Thursday, April 2, 2009 - 8:32 PM

In January, I wrote a column for Newsweek International, arguing that the Chinese are using the "pornography" excuse -- a goverment-sanctioned effort to crack down on online vulgarity -- to shut down several sites offering highly critical opinions on political and social issues in modern China (the most prominent of them was an edgy Chinese group blog, bullog.cn).

Now, other countries are getting the hang of China's tricks. News site Menassat reports on a recent "anti-porn" campaign in Bahrain being used to target a wide spectrum of groups, including those working on human rights issues. Even more disturbingly, the campaign has now spread to social media sites like Facebook. Here's a snippet from the article, but you should really go read it in full:

The activist added that this development has led to much frustration among Bahrainis.
“You should note that the outcry is amongst all citizens, even average business owners who rely on the web. There are some web services, like galleries, that are blocked despite being entirely unrelated to proxies or porn or local politics. We demand that a full investigation is put in place on how and why all these sites are blocked and not only those that are either porn-related or relevant to the authorities,” the activist told MENASSAT.
The activist agreed with the claims made by BCHR that the censorship campaign has expanded to social media sites, saying that authorities have been blocking Facebook links since the beginning of March.
“We can't even share articles on our Facebook profiles, which is something I do all the time,” said the activist.

The most interesting bit is the frustration felt by ordinary users who never wanted to access political content in the first place. As Ethan Zuckerman keeps arguing, such actions by the governments usually backfire, pushing regular users -- who need Flickr and Facebook to share pictures of cats and family vacations -- to learn how to use censor-evading tools like Tor and Psiphon that help to go around government censorship (Ethan even coined a name for this phenomenon -- the CuteCat Theory). It would be interesting to test if the use of proxies and tools like TOR would go up as a result of this campaign.

EXPLORE:MIDDLE EAST, HUMAN RIGHTS

Death by texting

Posted By Evgeny Morozov Friday, March 27, 2009 - 9:50 PM

Perhaps, we shouldn't take all those metaphorical expressions like the Blue Screen of Death so lightly. Especially after reports like this one from Egypt on iAfrica. Doesn't it all read like the plot of a disastrous Hollywood flick?

The Egyptian government has sought to dispel rumours that a mobile phone text message "from unknown foreign quarters" is spreading around the country and killing those who receive it.
The extraordinary move by Egypt's health and interior ministries follows press reports that an SMS containing a special combination of numbers killed a man in the town of Mallawi south of Cairo.
"He died vomiting blood, followed by stroke; shortly after he received a message from an unknown phone number," the Egyptian Gazette reported on Wednesday.
"The number begins with the symbol (+) and ends with (111)," it said.
An "official security source" was quoted by the official MENA news agency as denying that those who receive the SMS "get splitting headaches followed by brain haemorrhage that leads to death.
A statement from the health ministry quoted health officials in several regions as saying that they had "received no cases with such symptoms" "These rumours contradict all scientific facts," the statement said.
Egypt's interior ministry has detained three workers at an oil company for allegedly starting the rumours "and they are now being interrogated," MENA said.

Photo by pixel_addict/Flickr

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