Via CNET: Eighty percent of Americans believe that bloggers should not have the right to publish personal information about other people, according to a survey conducted by Hostway. Moreover, 72 percent of those polled felt that such censorship should extend to information about celebrities, and 68 percent to elected and appointed government officials. Just over half of the 2,500 people surveyed said bloggers should be given the same free speech protections as journalists, and nearly 40 percent said they found blogs “less credible” than newspaper articles. Aside from pervasive skepticism about blogging, the survey also revealed that most Americans still aren’t citizens of the blogosphere. More than two-thirds of those polled had either never visited a blog or never heard of them before the survey.
Injustice Libyan Style
Reporters Without Borders decried the arrest of 52-year-old Libyan cyber-dissident Abdel Razak Al Mansouri on Jan. 12 for criticizing the Libyan government on a British-based Web site, akhbar-libya. Mansouri, a bookseller by trade, wrote about social issues and human rights. He is reportedly being held in a Tripoli prison, though his family has received no official word of the arrest. “The authorities already control all the traditional media and now they are trying to gag the Internet, the last window on the outside world still accessible to Libyan citizens,” said Reporters Without Borders in a press statement.
Free speech for terrorists?
It has become increasingly easy for Islamic militants to post videos of bombings and beheadings on the Internet, reports CNN, and it’s probably only a matter of time until such insurgent groups are able to set up their own stable ‘news’ sites. Though groups like al Qaeda may have a difficult time finding permanent hosts for their Web sites, the nature of the Internet allows them to simply start anew if one particular host pulls the plug on them. “It becomes an endless ‘whack-a-mole’ game,” said Roger Cressy, a former White House official and security consultant. Web sites are a popular propaganda and recruiting tool for terrorists, and have in some ways become a fixture of the news community, often breaking stories of insurgent attacks.
