Attacks on the Press in 2010 - Committee to Protect Journalists

<strong>Attacks</strong> on the Press in 2010authoritarian states were able to marshal, or at least benefit from, sophisticated,high-tech attacks against independent media.The most straightforward of cyber-attacks is government-mandatedonline censorship: the nationwide blocking of media websites. Thispractice, long established in countries such as Iran and China, has nowspread to countries with some of the smallest Internet usage rates in theworld. In May, Rwanda’s two primary Internet service providers blockedthe online version of the tabloid Umuvugizi, the first time the country hadblocked any website, according to the Rwandan news agency RNA. Thecountry’s Media High Council—which had banned the print edition of thepaper, known for its critical coverage of the government—also ruled thatpublishing Umuvugizi online was unlawful. Afghanistan joined the leagueof countries censoring their citizens’ Internet connections with a lawNationwide blocking spreads to places withsmall online audiences.passed in June; it quickly began blocking not just the “immoral” sites thatthe law had singled out, but independent news outlets such as Benawa.A Pashto-language site, Benawa was blocked after it incorrectly reportedthat the first vice president, Mohammed Qasim Fahim, had died. (The sitecorrected the error within a half-hour.) According to the InternationalTelecommunication Union, or ITU, only 4.1 percent of Rwanda’s inhabitantsuse the Internet; in Afghanistan, the figure is less than 3.5 percent.Individual Internet access is almost nonexistent in Burma, one of theworld’s most censored countries, but Internet cafés are very popular. A2008 CPJ report found that Internet café users were routinely circumventinggovernment blocks to visit banned news sites run by exiled journalists.Now, the government appears to be stepping up high-tech attacks on theseexile-run news sites. Three exile outlets—Irrawaddy, the Mizzima newsagency, and the Democratic Voice of Burma—came under DDOS attacksin September, coinciding with the anniversary of the 2007 Saffron Revolution,a series of anti-government protests led by Buddhist monks that waseventually quashed by military force. The attacks recalled earlier efforts butfar exceeded them in force, Irrawaddy editors told CPJ. The exact origin ofthe DDOS attacks was unclear, but the effects were not. The exile-run sites,which traditionally provide some of the best firsthand information from10