Indonesia has joined Middle Eastern states to put pressure on RIM to provide authorities with BlackBerry interception capabilities. Today its communications regulator toned down earlier rhetoric, however, saying "so far there is absolutely no plan" to follow the UAE and Saudi Arabia in threatening to restrict BlackBerry services. Indonesia said it had appealed to the firm last year to establish a local data centre to assist law enforcement, but insisted it was "only a plea and there is no legal sanction". In most international markets, RIM routes encrypted BlackBerry communications its via facilities in Canada, avoiding interception laws (although large corporates typically run their own local servers). There is a Google translation of Indonesia's position here.

The escalating attacks on critical journalists in Tunisia are unprecedented since the establishment of the first Arab-language newspaper in the North African country, 150 years ago this July. Unlike scores of newspapers launched later by political activists to rally against the second-class-citizen status imposed on Tunisians in the wake of the French occupation in 1881, the weekly Arra'id Attunisi solely mirrored the views of the local authorities and echoed news mainly carried by Egyptian and Turkish papers. After the country’s independence in 1956, it became the official gazette. The price for critical journalism during the 75-year French Protectorate was sometimes costly. In 1911 Arab-language newspapers were banned for nearly 10 years. And in 1912, Ali Bach Hamba, editor of Le Tunisien, the first Tunisian French-language newspaper, and some of his colleagues were forced into exile. Other writers were jailed. All were all accused of being behind social unrest that led to repression and bloodshed in Tunis.

GILI MENO, INDONESIA — As one of the heads of the Indonesian Internet Service Provider Association, Valens Riyadi knows he has his work cut out for him. Last month, the country’s information minister, Tifatul Sembiring, said that local service providers would have to start blocking online pornography by the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, which starts Aug. 11. That deadline is fast approaching, and Mr. Riyadi says he still has no idea how he is going to put a filter in place. “It’s really a hard thing to do in technical terms,” he said. “For me, it’s almost an impossible task.” Mr. Sembiring has won plaudits for pledging to curb online pornography in this Muslim-majority democracy of 240 million people, and for following regional peers like China, Thailand and Singapore into the fraught world of Internet screening. But the problem, Mr. Riyadi says, is that the minister’s plan is really no plan at all.

In the annals of the net, one of the sacred texts is John Gilmore's aphorism that "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it". Mr Gilmore is a celebrated engineer, entrepreneur and libertarian activist, who is regarded by the US Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency and men in suits everywhere as a pain in the ass. He was the fifth employee of Sun Microsystems, which meant that he made a lot of money early in life, and he has devoted the rest of his time to spending it on a variety of excellent causes. These include: creating the "alt" (for alternative) hierarchy in the Usenet discussion fora; open-source software; drugs law reform; philanthropy; and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (which last week won a notable concession from the Library of Congress to legalise the "jailbreaking" of one's iPhone – ie liberating it from Apple's technical shackles). The Gilmore aphorism about censorship first saw the light of day in 1993 – in a Time article about the internet – and since then has taken on a life of its own as a consoling mantra about the libertarian potential of the network. "In its original form," Gilmore explains, "it meant that the Usenet software (which moves messages around in discussion newsgroups) was resistant to censorship because, if a node drops certain messages because it doesn't like their subject, the messages find their way past that node anyway by some other route." But, he continues, "The meaning of the phrase has grown through the years. Internet users have proven it time after time, by personally and publicly replicating information that is threatened with destruction or censorship."