Kazakhstan

Country Profile: Kazakhstan
Background Kazakhstan has taken an authoritarian turn under the rule of President Nazarbayev, who has served as head of state since national independence in 1991. Nazarbayev is widely alleged to have manipulated results of elections and suppressed opposition to remain in power.Commission on...
ONI Blog: Kazakhstan Shuts Down Internet and Mobile Network to Prevent "Kazakh Spring"
In light of Arab Spring and keeping in mind the potential of online organizing, Kazakhstan's government has taken drastic measures to prevent a similar "Kazakh Spring." According to Tech Eye, president Nursultan Nazarbayev gave orders last week to disable the...
ONI Blog: Kazakhstan Bans LiveJournal for Harboring "Extremism"
LiveJournal users in Kazakhstan will need to migrate somewhere else for their blogging activities, after an Astana city court recently placed the popular platform on a list of banned sites. Ailana Iskendirova, a court spokeswoman, stated that the sites placed on...
ONI Blog: Threats to the Open Net: August 26, 2011
Every week, the OpenNet Initiative provides a weekly news roundup (dubbed "Threats to the Open Net") in addition to our usual in-depth blog posts. If you would like to subscribe to the RSS feed for our newsreel, our entire blog,...
ONI Blog: Threats to the Open Net: July 15, 2011
Every week, the OpenNet Initiative provides a weekly news roundup (dubbed "Threats to the Open Net") in addition to our usual in-depth blog posts. If you would like to subscribe to the RSS feed for our newsreel, our entire blog,...
ONI Blog: Threats to the Open Net: June 10th, 2011
Every week, the OpenNet Initiative provides a weekly news roundup (dubbed "Threats to the Open Net") in addition to our usual in-depth blog posts. If you would like to subscribe to the RSS feed for our newsreel, our entire blog,...
ONI Blog: Google defies Kazakhstan’s attempt to “create borders on the web”, will re-route its users
As Google announced on its blog yesterday afternoon, it will start redirecting users of its customized Kazakh search engine, google.kz, to the international version. The move follows an order by Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Communications and Information that all .kz domain...
ONI Blog: Livejournal.com Inaccessible in Kazakhstan
Bloggers in Kazakhstan are having difficulty accessing popular blogging platform Livejournal. It was reported widely on Friday that Livejournal.com was inaccessible. The Moscow Times said of the alleged block: Internet users in Kazakhstan complained of censorship on Friday after being...
ONI Blog: Central Asian governments continue to clamp down on the Internet – II
Corruption rumors involving high-echelon officials is a sensitive topic for governments of the CIS. In October last year, ONI wrote a blog post on Kazakhstan’s political censorship of opposition sites. Four Web sites were shut down after they posted transcripts...
ONI Blog: Opposition Web sites shut down in Kazakhstan
Four opposition news Web sites in Kazakhstan were temporarily blocked during the last weeks. The oil-rich Central Asian country with strong ambitions to chair the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in 2009 has tightened the leash on the...