New Media Portal

Jemima Kiss from Guardian Unlimited shared a story about an Amnesty International’s event last night. It was on a subject “that doesn’t receive anywhere near enough attention – internet censorship”.

More than ten speakers are there and she said it was a rare treat to witness people drill down through a subject in such depth.

Martha Lane Fox, for instance, picked up what she sees as the three defining features of the internet that have remained consistent since she began working as co-founder of lastminute.com ten years ago: global potential of the web, disruptive nature of internet tools, and innovation that it inspires.

For instance, Martha, ten years ago, discovered Korean school kids doing homework for Australian school kids, utilising the overnight time difference.

There were also Ron Deibert, co-founder of OpenNet, who pointed out that 25 out of 41 countries were found to be filtering or monitoring web use. Six of those were “persasive” – Burma, China, Iran, Syria, Tunisia, and Vietnam. Sites like Flickr and YouTube are being banned and in Pakistan, the whole of Blogger is blocked.

From Iran: journalist and blogger Sina Motalebi spent three weeks in prison and was interrogated about every post on his blog. The head interrogator told him that this is to prove Motalebi is wrong – blogging is not a free way of expressing his views and beliefs.

But the interesting part is, if you think of USA as the safest place to blog, think again. Video blogger Josh Wolf spent 228 days in prison because he refused to hand over a video of protest against G8. “We need a federal shield law,” said Wolf.

“I go out and gather information and disseminate it to the public - that’s journalism.”

So what do you think?

Please click here to read Jemima Kiss’s full story.

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