It has been a bad week and a half for press freedom in the world. Just thought our chapter members might be interested in some reports of what has gone on in three highly visible areas. Seems the threats to media freedom never made it into the regular reports from these areas.
China
The Chinese government ordered all computers sold in the country to include a program called "Green Dam" by July 1 and then backed off.
The program, it turns out, is based on code stolen from a US company’s software designed to help parents restrict what their kids can view on the Internet.
Officially Beijing said the program was necessary to protect young people from pornography. The problem is that the leadership in China views open discussions of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 as pornographic.
The University of Michigan also found there were so many security leaks in the program that any system running it would be vunerable to an attack that could turn the computer into a zombie or even make any personal data available to the attacker. (Of course, many of us always thought this was one of the "features" that the Chinese government liked about Green Dam.)
IFEX did a nice review of the whole controversy: Beijing backs off from filtering tool. (And as an added bonus this report talks about how the central government blocked Internet and mobile phone access to the strife-torn Uighur area.)
Honduras
The military ouster of President Manuel Zelaya has the usual consequences of restrictions on media freedom in this Central American country.
Again, IFEX summarizes the reports of Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists: Press freedom violations continue post-coup.
Nicaragua
Jounralists critical of President Daniel Ortega or his wife find themselves under intense pressure and attack from the government. Ortega has described them as “children of Goebbels” and enemies of the Nicaraguan people. The official government media outlets also issue attacks against the independent media.
The Committee to Protect Journalists released last week a Nicaragua Special Report: Daniel Ortega’s Media War.
This is well worth the read. Ortega is falling back on his old ways when he ran Nicaragua in the 1980s as a friend of Cuba and the Soviet Union. Now, instead of closing all independent media as he did before, he is following the Hugo Chavez/Venezuela model of intimidation and threats.