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By: Malavika Jagannathan
Date: 06 Jul 2012
The Indian government on Friday said it has no plans to censor the Internet and social media.
Addressing a seminar organised by the Editors Guild of India, law minister Salman Khurshid said his colleague and information technology minister Kapil Sibal does not endorse the view of internet censorship in the country.
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By: Malavika Jagannathan
Date: 06 Jul 2012
Libya's caretaker government has quietly reactivated some of the interception equipment that fallen dictator Moammar Gadhafi once used to spy on his opponents.
The surveillance equipment has been used in recent months to track the phone calls and online communications of Gadhafi loyalists, according to two government officials and a security official.
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By: Malavika Jagannathan
Date: 05 Jul 2012
The United Nations' main human rights body has for the first time backed people's right to freedom of expression on the Internet in the wake of the massive role that social media networks played in the Arab Spring.
In a landmark resolution, the U.N. Human Rights Council's 47 members states agreed on Thursday that this right should be protected by all states and access to the Internet should also be guaranteed.
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By: Malavika Jagannathan
Date: 05 Jul 2012
The secret-spilling group WikiLeaks said Thursday it was in the process of publishing material from 2.4 million Syrian emails -- many of which it said came from official government accounts.
WikiLeaks' Sarah Harrison told journalists at London's Frontline Club that the emails reveal interactions between the Syrian government and Western companies, although she declined to go into much further detail.
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By: Malavika Jagannathan
Date: 05 Jul 2012
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has used an appearance at a conference in Turkmenistan to urge member states not to block Internet resources from public access.
Many websites, including social media platforms and foreign-based opposition news sites, are inaccessible in Central Asia, particularly in authoritarian Turkmenistan.
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By: Malavika Jagannathan
Date: 05 Jul 2012
European legislators dealt a blow to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, rejecting by a large margin the controversial treaty designed to better protect intellectual property around the world.
The decision on Wednesday makes it highly unlikely that the 27-nation bloc will approve the treaty in its current form and increases the likelihood that the global agreement, which the U.S. has strongly supported, will never come into force. The pact, known as ACTA, aims to create an international system of anti-counterfeiting and property-rights protection measures.
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By: Malavika Jagannathan
Date: 03 Jul 2012
A blacklist of internet sites being debated by Russia’s parliament could create “real censorship” of the internet, according to a human rights watchdog set up by the Kremlin.
“We believe it is very important to stop the implementation of censorship on the Russian-language section of the internet,” Russia’s Presidential Council for Human Rights said in a statement on Tuesday.
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By: Malavika Jagannathan
Date: 03 Jul 2012
Twitter has received more government requests for user information in the first six months of this year than it did in all of 2011, the company reported this week.
Taking a page from Google, the micro-blogging site released on Monday its first Twitter Transparency Reportlisting government requests for user information and to withhold content, and copyright holders DMCA takedown notices.
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By: Malavika Jagannathan
Date: 02 Jul 2012
The Sri Lankan police arrested nine journalists and seized computers and documents from the office of an independent news Web site on Friday, said a media rights group in Sri Lanka, one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists.
The police said they had a court warrant to act against the Web site, srilankamirror.com, but they have not explained the reasons for the arrests, said Gnanasiri Kottigoda, the president of the media rights group, the Sri Lanka Working Journalists Association.
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By: Malavika Jagannathan
Date: 02 Jul 2012
A number of international organizations such as Amnesty International, Mozilla, Hackers and Founders have signed the Internet Freedom Declaration, a document that calls for, among other things, Internet openness, access and privacy.
