On the 12th of March, Reporters Without Borders
released their 2012 edition of “Enemies of the Internet.” This report covers
the most internet restricted countries, considered “enemies”, and countries
with an extensive use of internet blocking referred to as “surveillance”
countries. For the most part the 2012 edition is almost the same as the 2011
with just a few changes. The two biggest changes are Belarus and Bahrain being
upgrade (or downgraded) from Surveillance to Enemies. Other changes include
India and Kazakhstan being added to the surveillance list and Libya and
Venezuela being removed from it. The full lists for 2012 and its 2011
predecessor go as follows.
2012 2011
Enemies Enemies
Bahrain Burma
Belarus China
Burma Cuba
China Iran
Cuba North
Korea
Iran Saudi
Arabia
North Korea Syria
Saudi Arabia Turkmenistan
Syria Uzbekistan
Turkmenistan Vietnam
Uzbekistan
Vietnam
2012 2011
Surveillance Surveillance
Australia Australia
Egypt Bahrain
Eritrea Belarus
France Egypt
India Eritrea
Kazakhstan France
Malaysia Libya
Russia Malaysia
South Korea Russia
Sri Lanka South
Korea
Thailand Sri
Lanka
Tunisia Thailand
Turkey Tunisia
United Arab Emirates Turkey
United
Arab Emirates
Venezuela
The change of Belarus and Bahrain were fairly predictable.
For those who don’t know Bahrain is an archipelago country off the coast of
Saudi Arabia. Uprisings began back in February of last year, around the same
time as the Arab spring. What started as a peaceful protest for political
freedom and human rights lead to an uprising against the Monarchy after the
police started to open fire on citizens. Of course this caused the government
to tighten the reins on the internet. They were scared of the possibilities of
an open internet with a country in revolt. This is pretty much the same reason
that the other countries are on the list.
Belarus, for any readers who were unaware, is good friends
with Russia, such good friends that back in the 90’s they formed the Union of
Russia and Belarus. Russia is considered “surveillance” and with the Belarusian
Government being the weaker of the two it makes sense that it would have to
censor more.
India was added to the 2012 surveillance list. As far as I
am aware the Indian censorship falls more along the lines of Australian
censorship compared to Tunisian or South Korean censorship. It’s mostly
censorship of nudity, sexual activities, religious things, and violence rather
than governmental. There is also the infamous Kashmir.
Libya was upgraded and taken off the surveillance list of
2012. Had the Libyan Revolution not been a success and if Gaddafi had not been
overthrown, Libya could be in the Enemies list rather than off the list
entirely. But because of the big changes in Libya this makes a lot of sense.
So I don’t think there were any real surprises in this year’s
list. What do you think? For more information you can go to Reports Without
Borders’ own website at http://en.rsf.org/. I
was able to locate a 2011 pdf version of RWB whole report at http://viewsdesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Internet-Enemies_2011.pdf.
I’ll keep my eye out for the full 2012 pdf to tweet out and post when it comes
around.
Thanks for reading,
Mike
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