Russian authorities blocked access to jailed Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny’s website on Monday (26 July) in the run-up to a parliamentary election, their latest attempt to sideline his allies cast by the Kremlin as US-backed trouble-makers.
Billions of people are inseparable from their phones. Their devices are within reach – and earshot – for almost every daily experience, from the most mundane to the most intimate.
Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos and location, activating their microphone to record them in real time.
Continue reading Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance
Cuba has restricted access to social media and messaging platforms including Facebook and WhatsApp, global internet monitoring firm NetBlocks said on Tuesday, in the wake of the biggest anti-government protests in decades.
Cubans facing the country’s worst economic crisis in decades took to the streets over the weekend. In turn, authorities blocked social media sites in an apparent effort to stop the flow of information into, out of and within the beleaguered nation.
Russia is increasingly pressuring Google, Twitter and Facebook to fall in line with Kremlin internet crackdown orders or risk restrictions inside the country, as more governments around the world challenge the companies’ principles on online freedom.
From the Great Firewall of China to the huge fines Germany has levied against social media giants for hosting hate speech, governments around the world are tightening their grip on the internet. The island of Mauritius is now debating a law that would represent a drastic acceleration of this trend. If it’s not opposed, the momentum will build—and threaten an open, rights-respecting internet.
Myanmar’s military rulers are seeking to limit access to the internet to an internal network of only “whitelisted” sites to quash opposition to their seizure of power, according to a report by the International Crisis Group.
[news release] Elected leaders in Europe and Eurasia are undermining the very institutions that brought them to office, rejecting democratic norms and promoting alternative systems of authoritarian governance, according to Nations in Transit, the annual Freedom House report on the state of democracy in the region.
Every Friday night for the past five weeks, hundreds of young Cubans have stayed up into the early morning to start their weekend off with a taste of something illicit: uncensored information.
Russia has implemented a novel censorship method in an ongoing effort to silence Twitter. Instead of blocking the social media site outright, the country is using previously unseen techniques to slow traffic to a crawl and make the site all but unusable for people inside the country.