Attacks on the Press in 2010 - Committee to Protect Journalists

<strong>Attacks</strong> on the Press in 2010In early 2010, Jacobs and FCCC members suffered another series ofhacking attacks on their Yahoo Web-based e-mail accounts. After revealingthese attacks in April, the FCCC found its own website brought downin a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) assault, a form of censorshipby information overload in which hundreds of thousands of computersare coordinated to send or demand data from a single website, causingits connection to the Internet to choke or its server to crash. The attackingcomputers are part of a “botnet,” ordinary home computers that havebeen taken over using malware just like the one installed by the PamBourdon e-mail, and remotely controlled en masse from afar.Surveillance threatens the lives and liberty ofreporters worldwide.When CPJ exchanged e-mails with Jacobs later in the year, he seemedphilosophical about the degree of surveillance in which he and his Beijingcolleagues worked. “Yes, I feel vulnerable,” he wrote, “but I’ve always assumedmy e-mail was being read and that my phones are tapped. ... It’smost unfortunate and creepy, but to be honest you just get used to it andcommunicate accordingly.”Surveillance and online censorship interfere with the work of internationaljournalists, but they are direct threats to the lives and libertyof local reporters worldwide. Illegal online surveillance has led to theincarceration of dozens of local journalists, most notably the Chineseeditor Shi Tao, whose Yahoo e-mail activity was used as evidence in 2005to sentence him to 10 years’ imprisonment on antistate charges. Roughlyhalf the people on CPJ’s 2010 census of imprisoned journalists conductedtheir work online, either as independent writers or as editors of Internetnews sites.The Chinese government has traditionally monitored foreign journalistsvery closely, from their electronic activity to their phone calls andmovements. The state employs the world’s most sophisticated technologyto watch and suppress its citizens. But governments with lesser reputationsfor understanding technology are now using increasingly sophisticatedtools. During the 2009 election protests in Iran, Western commentatorsemphasized how Internet-savvy the protesters were, drawingan implicit contrast to the regime. But when Newsweek reporter Maziar8