Source: The New York Times
Security forces shut down three American-financed democracy-building groups and as many as six other nonprofit organizations on Thursday, in a crackdown that signaled a new low in relations between Washington and Egypt’s military rulers.
Tag Archives: NGOs
Egypt raids offices of nonprofits, 3 backed by U.S.
December 29, 2011 – 3:59 pm
Ongoing Attacks on Human Rights Web sites and the Problem of Attribution
April 22, 2011 – 10:48 am
“A number of cyber attacks took place against human rights groups this week; including Armorize’s discovery of a variant of a “drive-by-download” attack on Amnesty International’s Web site. As this Armorize blogpost explains, “A drive-by download attack refers to the process of a user visiting an infected page and subsequently gets installed with malware, without his/her knowledge and without having him/her to click on or to agree to anything.” In the case of this week’s attack on Amnesty International, a “drive-by-cache attack” (term dubbed by Amorize) was launched.”
NGO gains access to Guantanamo documents but double standard still prevails
March 4, 2011 – 5:55 pm
“Reporters Without Borders welcomes the release of Department of Defence documents on 2 March that shed light on the Bush administration’s policies on the Guantanamo Bay detention centre and its views on the ‘significant risks’ to the general population if its detainees were freed. They were published in response to a request that the public interest group Judicial Watch filed under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in May 2009.
‘The decision to release these documents reflects the concern for transparency originally displayed by the Obama administration,’ Reporters Without Borders said. ‘We hope it will now take a similar decision on the release of photos depicting the abuse of prisoners by US military personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq. The White House U-turn on FOIA implementation in May 2009 was a bitter blow.’ ”
Human rights group files complaint against telecom chiefs for blackout
February 25, 2011 – 3:55 pm
“The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) yesterday filed a complaint with the prosecutor general demanding an investigation into both the minister of communications, and chairman of the National Telecommunications Authority’s criminal role in harming and killing demonstrators by cutting off internet and telecommunication services in Egypt.
Demonstrators in Tahrir Square, including ANHRI’s team were surprised on the evening of January 25 by the interruption of telecommunications services, which the group says caused financial consequences and caused their families to panic. Cell phone service was cut for a day, with limited service after that for weeks in Tahrir Square, and internet was also down for more than five days, exposing protesters to deadly risks as those who were injured were unable to get immediate medical attention. Many died because they could not reach hospitals, said The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information in a statement on Thursday.”
From Al Masry Al Youm
Just How Open Is Your Internet?
February 15, 2011 – 11:17 pm
Mashable features an infographic on Internet censorship based on data from the OpenNet Initiative.
From Mashable
The joys of online activism
January 18, 2011 – 3:21 pm
“There are many worrying trends in this modern era of globalisation, most notably the ease with which companies can operate and banks move money around, apparently outside any democratic parameters set by nations or an international community struggling to catch up with a rapidly liberalising context. But I have never been part of the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement because there are so many positive aspects to globalisation.”
From Guardian
Revealed: Second undercover police officer who posed as activist
January 13, 2011 – 1:55 pm
“The controversy over a police surveillance network embedded in the environmental protest movement has deepened dramatically after the Guardian identified a second undercover officer who spent years living a double life as an activist.
The woman’s name has been known to a group of six activists since Mark Kennedy – the police infiltrator identified by the Guardian on Monday as having spent seven years inside the movement – claimed she was also a police officer when confronted by them about his own identity last October.”
From The Guardian
Internet groups fear UN could threaten cyberspace
December 30, 2010 – 4:50 pm
Should governments have the only say in Internet governance? Non-governmental organizations are fighting to keep their seats at the Internet Governance Forum and the International Telecommunications Union. These important discussions are held in order to decide how to legislate and secure cyberspace, and typically include a variety of stakeholders such as NGOs and private firms. CTV News speaks to Ron Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab and the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies on the future of cyberspace governance.
From CTV News
2010 Report on Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks
December 20, 2010 – 5:21 pm
“Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is an increasingly common Internet phenomenon capable of silencing Internet speech, usually for a brief interval but occasionally for longer. In this paper, we explore the specific phenomenon of DDoS attacks on independent media and human rights organizations, seeking to understand the nature and frequency of these attacks, their efficacy, and the responses available to sites under attack.”
Granting Anonymity
December 17, 2010 – 12:21 pm
“Transparency is secretive business. WikiLeaks, the swashbuckling new-media organization whose motto is “We open governments,” relies on a technology of extreme reticence called Tor Hidden Services — a part of the Tor Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated not to light and clarity but to shadows and opacity, to the increasingly difficult art of keeping secrets online.
Kelsey DakeA deliberately byzantine system of virtual tunnels that conceal the origins and destinations of data, and thus the identity of clients, Tor has been around since 2001, when programmers from M.I.T. and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory introduced it at a California security conference. In the past year, supported by grants from the U.S. government and other funders, the Tor Project has prolifically expanded its networks. The software has been downloaded more than 36 million times this year, and thousands of nameless volunteers — many of them Tor clients — now help to relay mind-bogglingly diverse Tor data in nearly every country on earth.”
From The New York Times
