Do censorship and repression kill content on the Web?
Gharbia, Sami Ben
What happen to websites and blogs after they get blocked? Do arrested and threatened bloggers and digital activists stop their online activities once they face a governmental threat?
 Hello everybody, thank you for being here. It's about to be finished. So my name is Sami Mogherbiya, I'm from Tunisia and I am a political refugee in the Netherlands. I am also a Global Voices Advocacy Director, I don't know if you know about Global Voices and our project, Defending Online Free Speech Online. So I will talk about the effect of censorship on the content online. We already know what censorship is doing to Internet users. It's obviously that they cannot access the blogger's website and blogs and etc. But we don't know how bloggers and webmasters who have seen their blog or website, how they are dealing with that censorship, how they are finding workaround to create other websites and to make their content available. So I will go through the kind of censorship that is available. We've seen like five major scenarios of censorship. The first one is censorship and censorship is also multi-liers. You have keyword filtering, you have DNS blocking, you have URL blocking and you have also hacking and video attack. So one website is providing a decision content and this content is available online even if the website is being blocked through irises feed, through aggregators, Internet users can still access the content which supposedly is being blocked. So the government like Tunisia, China, Iran and others are really involved in hacking websites, deleting them or carrying out videos attack. The DeepPaget inspection is meant to monitor all kinds of content online and I will go through the case of Tunisia, how the Tunisian government is monitoring, emailing and is removing every kind of political content and replacing that inside the email with spam about how to enlarge your penis or how to use Viagra, etc. And the other kind of censorship is the self-censorship by creating an atmosphere of fear by arresting bloggers that kind of arrest and threat has a big impact on other bloggers who do not blog about politics, who do not criticize the statuque or the regime. They fear that a lot of them stop blocking. And the other one, the most dangerous one is the direct arrest and jailing and sentencing of the blogger and I will go through how we as Global Voices Advocacy were tracking the threat of online free speech. So this is our last project which called Threatnet Voices and it is also a crowdsourcing project in a way that it enables anyone to submit to us a report about bloggers, online writers, digital activists who have been arrested, jailed or threatened and sometimes killed because of their online activity. So it's a project to map the hotspot in the world about places where internet user, blogger and digital activists have been arrested or threatened because of their online activity. And the map is combined with a timeline which is very interactive so you can navigate the map and navigate the timeline, you can go to the past and see where, when exactly bloggers have been arrested and why. And if you go to a country profile, let's say Iran on the sidebar and on the navigation menu you have the list of all countries that we are indexing and if you click on the Iran country profile you will find a list of all bloggers that we know. I'm sure that we are not indexing and covering all bloggers that have been arrested but we are trying and doing our best to put all those cases online and help NGOs and traditional human rights organization find the accurate information and help activists advocate to free and release those bloggers and online activists. And you can see the list and you can see also the timeline that give you like the spike that you see in Iran, the red spike that is the number of the bloggers that have been arrested in Iran during the last post-election process. So by providing this kind of data visualization we will be enabling advocacy and human rights defenders to understand when, where exactly bloggers have been arrested and why. And by doing so we are giving advice actually to activists to be really carefully during major event during election they need to be really anonymous and they need to avoid any kind of keeping some traces like IP addresses or name or geolocation like when they are using Twitter they need to disable geolocation in order to not to give a chance to government to identify them and arrest them. The other thing on the sidebar you can see that submit a report so anyone can click on that and send us information about a blogger. So once we review the blogger and we check all the facts and we go through the internet to check all the information basically we go to reporters on frontier, human rights watch, Amnesty International and also all the information that global voices, huge team of blogger, translator, accurate editor who are providing information globally. So we publish that online if we are sure that the case is really true as a fact are true we publish that. We provide a link to the blogger, we provide the date of his arrest and if he's released it also the date of his release and if available we provide a link to the blog or the website that is advocating for his release. So on the sidebar you can see the campaign website by clicking on that badge will go to Frihudar website. In this example I'm talking about Hossain Deraxian the blog father of the Iranian block sphere, the one who's translated the tools and made the Iranian block sphere so powerful he's now in jail. So that's an example simply to raise awareness now about his case. And then we are also providing some data visualization and some graphs to help people especially journalists and human rights advocate to understand when exactly blogger have been arrested what country are really repressive against blogger and digital activists in the world and we provide like the top 10 countries in the world who are really repressive against the blogger and we see here like China, Iran, Egypt, Tunisia and Syria etc are among the top 10 country who are cracking down online free speech especially by arresting and threatening bloggers. And we also provide graphs to understand if the bloggers, how many bloggers are released, how many bloggers are still in jail, how many bloggers are threatened and how many bloggers are really deceased and we have in our database three case of blogger who have been deceased, one of them was killed in jail during torture and the two others have been passed away into there, both Tunisian. So and if you navigate to a country page you will see also the same graphs that give you insight when bloggers, when in which period of the years bloggers get arrested and in Tunisia, this is an example of Tunisia we've seen in 2009 two bloggers have been arrested during the election in Tunisia but unfortunately the media, the big media, the mainstream media only focus Iran and China are very high, very sexy actually in the human rights feed but they never talk about what's happening in Tunisia or in Mauritania where bloggers also have been arrested during election. So and playing with the data we can really find out a lot of amazing stuff. We can discover that the Arab world is the most repressive region in the world toward bloggers. So like here 41% of the bloggers that we are indexing on our website are from the Arab world and if we add Iran to the Arab world and we are talking now about the Middle East in general, we see that 55% of the bloggers worldwide who have been threatened are from the Middle East. So we can play with the data in all ways and this is a funny way that our friend from Global Voice is a blogger and as Tise have compared the years that Ben Ali or Assad or Mubarak have stayed in power and the number of bloggers who have been arrested there and it's funny to see and to discover that the number of the years for presidents in power is almost equal to the number of bloggers that have been arrested. So it's a funny way to play with the data and we are about to release the API of this database to enable all kinds of websites, especially journalists and human rights advocates to display the data and connect with our database and make it visible on their website as well. So now we go back to the censorship and repression. Are they really against the content? Are they killing the content online? What happened when the blogger gets arrested? What happens to his blog? So here I provide two examples. The first one is from Saudi Arabia, a blogger called Fouad Al Farhan who got arrested because of his support first to the reformist movement in Saudi Arabia and especially because of one of his most recent posts before his arrest was about 10 personalities in Saudi Arabia that he does not like and he does not want to meet. And among those 10 personalities was the Prince of Saudi Arabia and a minister. So after that post Fouad Al Farhan got arrested. So that's a screenshot of his blog I got from thearchive.org because the blog, as you can see on the right side, is unavailable. The second screenshot is from a website of Iranian blogger, human rights activist and feminist who was arrested because of her online activity. And if you visit her blog now, you will see that screenshot on the right side. This is only two examples and you can see dozens and dozens. If you navigate Threatened Voices and you click on the link to the blogs of those arrested and threatened voices you will discover that I can't give any percentage of how many blogs are dead but I can assure you that dozens and dozens of bloggers do not blog anymore because of the repression that they faced. This is a map, a network of the digital activist in Tunisia. The map was done by my friend from the Netherlands, Fika Janssen, studying the digital activism in the Arab world. And it draws the kind of network that exists in that country, in the cyberspace of that country. And we can see the clusters and which websites and blogs are the most important in that map. So like here in the middle there is a big dot, the white one, the web.go.org which is providing all kinds of links to all the other clusters of the cyberspace, digital cyberspace in Tunisia. And I should also point out that all those dots are blocked in Tunisia. All the websites and blogs that are talking about politics and that are critical to the government are blocked. But if we add the filter of dead websites we see all the black dots that you see on the map are blogs and websites that do not exist anymore. So this kind of effect is having on the cyberspace in Tunisia. And as I said we cannot prove that censorship is really killing content. We need to make a comparison, another study to see if the websites and blogs who are not blocked and censored are also really dead. So we need to go deeper in this study. The digital methods initiative from the University of Amsterdam are trying to provide a tool that will help us crawl and understand, let's say, 200 links and analyze them and find out if those blogs and websites are dead. And by dead I mean that they are not updated anymore, that the DNS does not exist anymore, that the website is being hacked by spammer and user to provide a sponsor on the link, etc. And I will go through a few examples to let you see how this phenomenon is having a huge impact on free speech online. So from the examples of the map of the digital activism in Tunisia that I displayed, 34% are dead websites. And these are an example of the Tunisian website of Lalik Tunisian, the screenshot is from the archive.org as well. And now if you go to the link of that website you will find out that it's becoming a Chinese website. I don't know how a Tunisian website which is providing content in Arabic and French and in English is becoming a Chinese website. I really don't know how this kind of stuff is happening. This is another example from a major human rights NGO in Tunisia, Conseil National pour la liberté en Tunisie. And if you visit his link now you will see a website providing a sponsored link and buying and selling stuff. This is another example from another human rights NGO in Tunisia as well. This is screenshot from archive.org and now if you visit that link you will see that the DNS is reserved but there is no content on that website. This is another kind of killing content online. Tunisia, China and Iran are using DeepBugget inspection and fortunately the software and the tools that they are using to do that keyword filtering are provided by Western companies. We've heard about Simons and Nokia in Iran but we never heard about smart filter, secure computing, McAfee in Tunisia, Saudi Arabia in Sudan, in the United Arab Emirates, etc. Iran and China are very sexy and high issues but other part of the world are really not raised as repressive to the human rights. So if you Google, if users Google and try to look to search for a word like Tunisia and censorship, they will find those images but there are few websites like nowet.org, Tunisie news.net and Global Voices are filtered. All the images that are being hosted on those websites are not to see on Google, on Yahoo, on Bing and all the other search engines. This is another example of the DeepBugget inspection and this is a newsletter that is being sent daily by the popular Tunisie news website. If you can see the first screenshot is from an email that you can read outside of Tunisia but if you are inside of Tunisia, you will see the other email, an email which is talking about how to enlarge your penis. So what the Tunisian government is doing is filtering all the emails that are going through the network in Tunisia and once they found something which is politically engaged or critical, they removed that content and replaced it with spam actually. So this is another kind of killing content through email, not on the web. So in general, the consequences of censorship, how do they affect online free speech and especially how do they affect bloggers and webmasters? So first the short term is the bloggers gain some visibility. They became popular but not all of them. I mean the most popular bloggers have the media coverage but if you are an unknown blogger, if you are from countries that are marginalized in the mainstream media, no one will talk about you. Few websites like Global Voices and other initiative will talk about your case and try to raise awareness. But in general, big media, Washington Post, CNN, York Times, even hearing in Germany or in France, Le Monde, Le Figaro, they won't talk about that. It's not interesting, it's not sexy. This information don't say. So but on the long term, bloggers will find themselves alone. They need to deal with that censorship. What to do next? And the most important goal of censoring a blogger or dissident writer online is to isolate him from his readership, from his natural environment. So once you get your blog is blocked, you will lose your readership first. And then you will lose the conversation. No one will comment on your blog because they cannot access it from that country. Well, if your fellow friend or bloggers are living abroad, they can still access that blog and go on with the conversation. But the main readership, your main audience, the target group, that is the goal of your blogging activity cannot access anymore your blog. So actually the conversation is dead. The content is dead if your blog and website is being blocked. And then there is a shift from blocking to protesting. I mean, once you get blocked, you will protest censorship. If you was focusing on social justice, if you were blogging about environment, if you was blogging about human rights abuse, you won't talk about those issues anymore. You will focus on censorship on your free speech and will try to get it back. So bloggers will lose their editorial freedom and the government will impose another editorial line which is protesting censorship, which is not effective because your blog is not any more accessible from within your country. And we've seen that a lot of bloggers are becoming activists once they get arrested. And there is a theory coined by our colleague and friend Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices, which is the QtCAD theory, which means that once bloggers and internet users cannot access websites for fun, they cannot go to Flickr to see a picture of QtCAD, they cannot access YouTube to see a funny movie and laugh about that content. If they cannot do that anymore, a tiny percentage of those internet users will become politically active against the government, which is funny actually, but it is very bad because you are changing the nature of the internet behavior from free and normal behavior to a politically behavior. And then bloggers, once their blog or website gets blocked, they doubt about the meaning of blogging. If you lose your readership, if no one will come to your blog or website to publish a comment, so while you are writing actually, who is your audience, you still, you start doubting about blogging, few bloggers stop blogging, few other will practice self-censorship. They will create another blog and they will avoid talking about any kind of political or sensitive issues. And now we will go to the scenario, the technical scenario that are there available for bloggers and webmasters to deal with censorship. So, creating once your domain name is blogged or the link to your blogspot blog or WordPress blog or LiveJournal is blogged, the easiest way and the simplest solution is to create another blog, which is very, very easy. I mean, you can go to blogspot or to WordPress and in five minutes you set up a new blog, but you will lose the page ranking of your old blog, you will lose all the incoming links from search engine, from major blogs, maybe from mainstream media that are linking to your blogged blog, you will lose them. And then you can migrate to another blog. I mean, if you are blogging on blogspot and your blog got blocked, it's very easy to migrate to WordPress because WordPress has that capacity to import your XML file from blogspot to WordPress. If you are using Spip, a French CMS platform, if you are using TypePad, if you are using any kind of local publishing software, you cannot anymore import that content from that platform to another platform. And if you can, you need some technical knowledge. So this kind of technique is not accessible for anyone, it is only accessible for people who have some technical skill. A redirecting to another domain name, which is also very easy. I mean, if they blog your domain name, let's say myblog.com, you can create another domain name, you can buy it, mysecondblog.com. And then with a simple tweaking of the DNS or another file on your FTP server, you can redirect the old link to the new link. But also this is technically difficult for people who do not have any kind of technical knowledge. And also it's impossible for people who do not have a hosting server. If you are blogging on blogspot, you can do that. Because blogspot offers you the possibility to edit the template of your blog. And you can put JavaScript on the header of the template that will redirect automatically all visitors and all links from search engines, etc. So you can do that. If you are blogging on the popular wordpress.com, you cannot do that because wordpress.com does not offer this kind of editing option inside the platform. Setting up a mirror blog. A lot of blogs get blocked and then they create another blog and they mirror the content of the blog to the other blog, which is very easy to do, but only for people who have advanced technical knowledge as well. It's not affordable for all bloggers. I think maybe only 5 or 10% of bloggers can do this, but the rest cannot deal with this kind of mirroring techniques. And there is another way of becoming exiled blogger. We've seen it in Saudi Arabia, we've seen it in Egypt, we've seen it in Tunisia. We've seen it in all those countries engaged in internet censorship that once the blogger got blocked, he started publishing his article on another blog. So his friend, his fellow bloggers will host his content, but this is temporarily you won't give completely your blog to another blogger. It's very personal blog, it's your blog. So this kind of solution is only for a short period of time. And the other way is relying on major websites. A lot of bloggers once their blog got blocked, they start publishing their content on Facebook. They start publishing their photo or their video on YouTube, on Flickr, and they start tweeting. But that is also very limited because there is a kind of censorship with targeting specific pages on Facebook. Bahrain is doing this, Tunisia is doing this. I think China and other places are doing the same. So if you are politically very active on Facebook, it is very easy for the government to block your page. The other is self-censorship. You won't talk about any kind of political issue. And the other is stop blocking. And we've seen that a lot of bloggers, once they get blocked, they stop blogging at all. But there is the micro pipeline as unblockable system. If you publish your stuff, but also this kind of technique is only available for people who have some technical knowledge, who are following the trends of the web. So if you send an email to Posteros, Posteros will automatically publish that content and will send it automatically as well to YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, etc. Which is very automated and easy and you will make the censor crazy because you cannot understand anymore from where you are publishing and where you are publishing. So a lot of activists in Tunisia and other countries are using this technique and they are making this kind of mouse and cat and mouse game with the government. Okay, you block my blog, I will publish on Posteros and Posteros will publish automatically my content to ten other platforms. Which is very, very funny way. But again, this kind of technique does not work against keyword filtering. I mean, if you are using, let's say, democracy and Tunisia is filtering that word. Even if you publish the same content on ten other websites, the same content will still be blocked and inaccessible in Tunisia. So that's why I say this technique is very useful, but it's also not working all the time and everywhere. This is an example of cross-posting through WordPress, to Twitter, to Facebook and to other platforms, used by the Nowel.org. This is also another technique used by Nowel.org on Google Earth and Google and YouTube by publishing your video on YouTube and by Jio tagging those videos on YouTube by giving a place, a location to those videos by doing that, actually you are cross-publishing the same content on Google Earth and Google Map. So if you go to the palace of the president, Penali, in Tunisia, if you navigate and fly to that place on Google Earth, you will notice that the palace, the presidential palace, is surrounded by a lot of videos that are talking about human rights abuse in Tunisia. But those icons are visible, but once you click on them, you cannot watch the video because YouTube is a blog in Tunisia and Daily Motion and VATTV. So they are using this kind of cross-posting from a web site, which is YouTube, to another application of Google, which is Google Earth. They are trying to attract the attention of Tunisia. They know that they cannot watch the video, but they will be curious to know what is there and they will try to use a proxy and they will access YouTube by using Tor or using Syphon or any kind of circumvention software. This is also another kind of sponsor on links as unblockable dissemination of content. They are using AdSense. They buy some keywords from Google AdSense and then they put some political content there. So Benali is the book, which means in Arabic enough is enough Benali. If you Google SMSC, which was the World Summit on Information and Society in Tunisia in 2005, the first result will be the online demonstration against President Benali. So it's a funny way to play with the sensor in Tunisia. Okay, you block the Yezi.org website. We still can publish that information on pro-governmental websites like Tunisipdo and other websites using the technique of Google AdSense and AdWords. So I think I don't have time anymore, so if you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer that. Thank you. I'm sorry we don't have any time for questions anymore. Thank you very much. Thank you.
 Hello everybody, thank you for being here.  It's about to be finished.  So my name is Sami Mogherbiya, I'm from Tunisia and I am a political refugee in the Netherlands.  I am also a Global Voices Advocacy Director, I don't know if you know about Global Voices  and our project, Defending Online Free Speech Online.  So I will talk about the effect of censorship on the content online.  We already know what censorship is doing to Internet users.  It's obviously that they cannot access the blogger's website and blogs and etc.  But we don't know how bloggers and webmasters who have seen their blog or website,  how they are dealing with that censorship, how they are finding workaround  to create other websites and to make their content available.  So I will go through the kind of censorship that is available.  We've seen like five major scenarios of censorship.  The first one is censorship and censorship is also multi-liers.  You have keyword filtering, you have DNS blocking, you have URL blocking  and you have also hacking and video attack.  So one website is providing a decision content and this content is available online  even if the website is being blocked through irises feed, through aggregators,  Internet users can still access the content which supposedly is being blocked.  So the government like Tunisia, China, Iran and others are really involved  in hacking websites, deleting them or carrying out videos attack.  The DeepPaget inspection is meant to monitor all kinds of content online  and I will go through the case of Tunisia, how the Tunisian government is monitoring,  emailing and is removing every kind of political content  and replacing that inside the email with spam about how to enlarge your penis  or how to use Viagra, etc.  And the other kind of censorship is the self-censorship by creating an atmosphere of fear  by arresting bloggers that kind of arrest and threat has a big impact on other bloggers  who do not blog about politics, who do not criticize the statuque or the regime.  They fear that a lot of them stop blocking.  And the other one, the most dangerous one is the direct arrest  and jailing and sentencing of the blogger and I will go through how we as Global Voices Advocacy  were tracking the threat of online free speech.  So this is our last project which called Threatnet Voices  and it is also a crowdsourcing project in a way that it enables anyone to submit to us  a report about bloggers, online writers, digital activists who have been arrested, jailed or threatened  and sometimes killed because of their online activity.  So it's a project to map the hotspot in the world about places where internet user, blogger  and digital activists have been arrested or threatened because of their online activity.  And the map is combined with a timeline which is very interactive so you can navigate the map  and navigate the timeline, you can go to the past and see where, when exactly bloggers have been arrested and why.  And if you go to a country profile, let's say Iran on the sidebar and on the navigation menu  you have the list of all countries that we are indexing and if you click on the Iran country profile  you will find a list of all bloggers that we know.  I'm sure that we are not indexing and covering all bloggers that have been arrested  but we are trying and doing our best to put all those cases online and help NGOs  and traditional human rights organization find the accurate information  and help activists advocate to free and release those bloggers and online activists.  And you can see the list and you can see also the timeline that give you like the spike that you see in Iran, the red spike  that is the number of the bloggers that have been arrested in Iran during the last post-election process.  So by providing this kind of data visualization we will be enabling advocacy and human rights defenders  to understand when, where exactly bloggers have been arrested and why.  And by doing so we are giving advice actually to activists to be really carefully during major event during election  they need to be really anonymous and they need to avoid any kind of keeping some traces like IP addresses or name or geolocation  like when they are using Twitter they need to disable geolocation in order to not to give a chance to government  to identify them and arrest them.  The other thing on the sidebar you can see that submit a report so anyone can click on that and send us information about a blogger.  So once we review the blogger and we check all the facts and we go through the internet to check all the information  basically we go to reporters on frontier, human rights watch, Amnesty International  and also all the information that global voices, huge team of blogger, translator,  accurate editor who are providing information globally.  So we publish that online if we are sure that the case is really true as a fact are true we publish that.  We provide a link to the blogger, we provide the date of his arrest and if he's released it also the date of his release  and if available we provide a link to the blog or the website that is advocating for his release.  So on the sidebar you can see the campaign website by clicking on that badge will go to Frihudar website.  In this example I'm talking about Hossain Deraxian the blog father of the Iranian block sphere,  the one who's translated the tools and made the Iranian block sphere so powerful he's now in jail.  So that's an example simply to raise awareness now about his case.  And then we are also providing some data visualization and some graphs to help people  especially journalists and human rights advocate to understand when exactly blogger have been arrested  what country are really repressive against blogger and digital activists in the world  and we provide like the top 10 countries in the world who are really repressive against the blogger  and we see here like China, Iran, Egypt, Tunisia and Syria etc are among the top 10 country  who are cracking down online free speech especially by arresting and threatening bloggers.  And we also provide graphs to understand if the bloggers, how many bloggers are released,  how many bloggers are still in jail, how many bloggers are threatened and how many bloggers are really deceased  and we have in our database three case of blogger who have been deceased,  one of them was killed in jail during torture and the two others have been passed away into there, both Tunisian.  So and if you navigate to a country page you will see also the same graphs that give you insight  when bloggers, when in which period of the years bloggers get arrested and in Tunisia,  this is an example of Tunisia we've seen in 2009 two bloggers have been arrested during the election in Tunisia  but unfortunately the media, the big media, the mainstream media only focus Iran and China  are very high, very sexy actually in the human rights feed but they never talk about what's happening in Tunisia  or in Mauritania where bloggers also have been arrested during election.  So and playing with the data we can really find out a lot of amazing stuff.  We can discover that the Arab world is the most repressive region in the world toward bloggers.  So like here 41% of the bloggers that we are indexing on our website are from the Arab world  and if we add Iran to the Arab world and we are talking now about the Middle East in general,  we see that 55% of the bloggers worldwide who have been threatened are from the Middle East.  So we can play with the data in all ways and this is a funny way that our friend from Global Voice is a blogger  and as Tise have compared the years that Ben Ali or Assad or Mubarak have stayed in power  and the number of bloggers who have been arrested there and it's funny to see and to discover that the number of the years  for presidents in power is almost equal to the number of bloggers that have been arrested.  So it's a funny way to play with the data and we are about to release the API of this database  to enable all kinds of websites, especially journalists and human rights advocates to display the data  and connect with our database and make it visible on their website as well.  So now we go back to the censorship and repression.  Are they really against the content? Are they killing the content online?  What happened when the blogger gets arrested? What happens to his blog?  So here I provide two examples. The first one is from Saudi Arabia, a blogger called Fouad Al Farhan  who got arrested because of his support first to the reformist movement in Saudi Arabia  and especially because of one of his most recent posts before his arrest was about 10 personalities in Saudi Arabia  that he does not like and he does not want to meet.  And among those 10 personalities was the Prince of Saudi Arabia and a minister.  So after that post Fouad Al Farhan got arrested.  So that's a screenshot of his blog I got from thearchive.org  because the blog, as you can see on the right side, is unavailable.  The second screenshot is from a website of Iranian blogger, human rights activist and feminist  who was arrested because of her online activity.  And if you visit her blog now, you will see that screenshot on the right side.  This is only two examples and you can see dozens and dozens.  If you navigate Threatened Voices and you click on the link to the blogs of those arrested and threatened voices  you will discover that I can't give any percentage of how many blogs are dead  but I can assure you that dozens and dozens of bloggers do not blog anymore  because of the repression that they faced.  This is a map, a network of the digital activist in Tunisia.  The map was done by my friend from the Netherlands, Fika Janssen,  studying the digital activism in the Arab world.  And it draws the kind of network that exists in that country, in the cyberspace of that country.  And we can see the clusters and which websites and blogs are the most important in that map.  So like here in the middle there is a big dot, the white one, the web.go.org  which is providing all kinds of links to all the other clusters of the cyberspace, digital cyberspace in Tunisia.  And I should also point out that all those dots are blocked in Tunisia.  All the websites and blogs that are talking about politics and that are critical to the government are blocked.  But if we add the filter of dead websites we see all the black dots that you see on the map  are blogs and websites that do not exist anymore.  So this kind of effect is having on the cyberspace in Tunisia.  And as I said we cannot prove that censorship is really killing content.  We need to make a comparison, another study to see if the websites and blogs who are not blocked  and censored are also really dead.  So we need to go deeper in this study.  The digital methods initiative from the University of Amsterdam are trying to provide a tool  that will help us crawl and understand, let's say, 200 links and analyze them  and find out if those blogs and websites are dead.  And by dead I mean that they are not updated anymore, that the DNS does not exist anymore,  that the website is being hacked by spammer and user to provide a sponsor on the link, etc.  And I will go through a few examples to let you see how this phenomenon is having a huge impact on free speech online.  So from the examples of the map of the digital activism in Tunisia that I displayed, 34% are dead websites.  And these are an example of the Tunisian website of Lalik Tunisian, the screenshot is from the archive.org as well.  And now if you go to the link of that website you will find out that it's becoming a Chinese website.  I don't know how a Tunisian website which is providing content in Arabic and French and in English  is becoming a Chinese website. I really don't know how this kind of stuff is happening.  This is another example from a major human rights NGO in Tunisia, Conseil National pour la liberté en Tunisie.  And if you visit his link now you will see a website providing a sponsored link and buying and selling stuff.  This is another example from another human rights NGO in Tunisia as well.  This is screenshot from archive.org and now if you visit that link you will see that the DNS is reserved but there is no content on that website.  This is another kind of killing content online.  Tunisia, China and Iran are using DeepBugget inspection and fortunately the software and the tools that they are using to do that  keyword filtering are provided by Western companies.  We've heard about Simons and Nokia in Iran but we never heard about smart filter, secure computing,  McAfee in Tunisia, Saudi Arabia in Sudan, in the United Arab Emirates, etc.  Iran and China are very sexy and high issues but other part of the world are really not raised as repressive to the human rights.  So if you Google, if users Google and try to look to search for a word like Tunisia and censorship,  they will find those images but there are few websites like nowet.org, Tunisie news.net and Global Voices are filtered.  All the images that are being hosted on those websites are not to see on Google, on Yahoo, on Bing and all the other search engines.  This is another example of the DeepBugget inspection and this is a newsletter that is being sent daily by the popular Tunisie news website.  If you can see the first screenshot is from an email that you can read outside of Tunisia but if you are inside of Tunisia,  you will see the other email, an email which is talking about how to enlarge your penis.  So what the Tunisian government is doing is filtering all the emails that are going through the network in Tunisia  and once they found something which is politically engaged or critical, they removed that content and replaced it with spam actually.  So this is another kind of killing content through email, not on the web.  So in general, the consequences of censorship, how do they affect online free speech and especially how do they affect bloggers and webmasters?  So first the short term is the bloggers gain some visibility.  They became popular but not all of them.  I mean the most popular bloggers have the media coverage but if you are an unknown blogger, if you are from countries that are marginalized in the mainstream media,  no one will talk about you. Few websites like Global Voices and other initiative will talk about your case and try to raise awareness.  But in general, big media, Washington Post, CNN, York Times, even hearing in Germany or in France, Le Monde, Le Figaro, they won't talk about that.  It's not interesting, it's not sexy. This information don't say.  So but on the long term, bloggers will find themselves alone. They need to deal with that censorship. What to do next?  And the most important goal of censoring a blogger or dissident writer online is to isolate him from his readership, from his natural environment.  So once you get your blog is blocked, you will lose your readership first.  And then you will lose the conversation. No one will comment on your blog because they cannot access it from that country.  Well, if your fellow friend or bloggers are living abroad, they can still access that blog and go on with the conversation.  But the main readership, your main audience, the target group, that is the goal of your blogging activity cannot access anymore your blog.  So actually the conversation is dead. The content is dead if your blog and website is being blocked.  And then there is a shift from blocking to protesting. I mean, once you get blocked, you will protest censorship.  If you was focusing on social justice, if you were blogging about environment, if you was blogging about human rights abuse,  you won't talk about those issues anymore. You will focus on censorship on your free speech and will try to get it back.  So bloggers will lose their editorial freedom and the government will impose another editorial line which is protesting censorship,  which is not effective because your blog is not any more accessible from within your country.  And we've seen that a lot of bloggers are becoming activists once they get arrested.  And there is a theory coined by our colleague and friend Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices,  which is the QtCAD theory, which means that once bloggers and internet users cannot access websites for fun,  they cannot go to Flickr to see a picture of QtCAD, they cannot access YouTube to see a funny movie and laugh about that content.  If they cannot do that anymore, a tiny percentage of those internet users will become politically active against the government,  which is funny actually, but it is very bad because you are changing the nature of the internet behavior from free and normal behavior to a politically behavior.  And then bloggers, once their blog or website gets blocked, they doubt about the meaning of blogging.  If you lose your readership, if no one will come to your blog or website to publish a comment, so while you are writing actually,  who is your audience, you still, you start doubting about blogging, few bloggers stop blogging,  few other will practice self-censorship. They will create another blog and they will avoid talking about any kind of political or sensitive issues.  And now we will go to the scenario, the technical scenario that are there available for bloggers and webmasters to deal with censorship.  So, creating once your domain name is blogged or the link to your blogspot blog or WordPress blog or LiveJournal is blogged,  the easiest way and the simplest solution is to create another blog, which is very, very easy. I mean, you can go to blogspot or to WordPress  and in five minutes you set up a new blog, but you will lose the page ranking of your old blog, you will lose all the incoming links from search engine,  from major blogs, maybe from mainstream media that are linking to your blogged blog, you will lose them. And then you can migrate to another blog.  I mean, if you are blogging on blogspot and your blog got blocked, it's very easy to migrate to WordPress because WordPress has that capacity to import your XML file from blogspot to WordPress.  If you are using Spip, a French CMS platform, if you are using TypePad, if you are using any kind of local publishing software,  you cannot anymore import that content from that platform to another platform. And if you can, you need some technical knowledge.  So this kind of technique is not accessible for anyone, it is only accessible for people who have some technical skill.  A redirecting to another domain name, which is also very easy. I mean, if they blog your domain name, let's say myblog.com, you can create another domain name,  you can buy it, mysecondblog.com. And then with a simple tweaking of the DNS or another file on your FTP server, you can redirect the old link to the new link.  But also this is technically difficult for people who do not have any kind of technical knowledge. And also it's impossible for people who do not have a hosting server.  If you are blogging on blogspot, you can do that. Because blogspot offers you the possibility to edit the template of your blog.  And you can put JavaScript on the header of the template that will redirect automatically all visitors and all links from search engines, etc.  So you can do that. If you are blogging on the popular wordpress.com, you cannot do that because wordpress.com does not offer this kind of editing option inside the platform.  Setting up a mirror blog. A lot of blogs get blocked and then they create another blog and they mirror the content of the blog to the other blog,  which is very easy to do, but only for people who have advanced technical knowledge as well. It's not affordable for all bloggers.  I think maybe only 5 or 10% of bloggers can do this, but the rest cannot deal with this kind of mirroring techniques.  And there is another way of becoming exiled blogger. We've seen it in Saudi Arabia, we've seen it in Egypt, we've seen it in Tunisia.  We've seen it in all those countries engaged in internet censorship that once the blogger got blocked, he started publishing his article on another blog.  So his friend, his fellow bloggers will host his content, but this is temporarily you won't give completely your blog to another blogger.  It's very personal blog, it's your blog. So this kind of solution is only for a short period of time.  And the other way is relying on major websites. A lot of bloggers once their blog got blocked, they start publishing their content on Facebook.  They start publishing their photo or their video on YouTube, on Flickr, and they start tweeting.  But that is also very limited because there is a kind of censorship with targeting specific pages on Facebook.  Bahrain is doing this, Tunisia is doing this. I think China and other places are doing the same.  So if you are politically very active on Facebook, it is very easy for the government to block your page.  The other is self-censorship. You won't talk about any kind of political issue.  And the other is stop blocking. And we've seen that a lot of bloggers, once they get blocked, they stop blogging at all.  But there is the micro pipeline as unblockable system.  If you publish your stuff, but also this kind of technique is only available for people who have some technical knowledge, who are following the trends of the web.  So if you send an email to Posteros, Posteros will automatically publish that content and will send it automatically as well to YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, etc.  Which is very automated and easy and you will make the censor crazy because you cannot understand anymore from where you are publishing and where you are publishing.  So a lot of activists in Tunisia and other countries are using this technique and they are making this kind of mouse and cat and mouse game with the government.  Okay, you block my blog, I will publish on Posteros and Posteros will publish automatically my content to ten other platforms.  Which is very, very funny way. But again, this kind of technique does not work against keyword filtering.  I mean, if you are using, let's say, democracy and Tunisia is filtering that word.  Even if you publish the same content on ten other websites, the same content will still be blocked and inaccessible in Tunisia.  So that's why I say this technique is very useful, but it's also not working all the time and everywhere.  This is an example of cross-posting through WordPress, to Twitter, to Facebook and to other platforms, used by the Nowel.org.  This is also another technique used by Nowel.org on Google Earth and Google and YouTube by publishing your video on YouTube and by Jio tagging those videos on YouTube  by giving a place, a location to those videos by doing that, actually you are cross-publishing the same content on Google Earth and Google Map.  So if you go to the palace of the president, Penali, in Tunisia, if you navigate and fly to that place on Google Earth,  you will notice that the palace, the presidential palace, is surrounded by a lot of videos that are talking about human rights abuse in Tunisia.  But those icons are visible, but once you click on them, you cannot watch the video because YouTube is a blog in Tunisia and Daily Motion and VATTV.  So they are using this kind of cross-posting from a web site, which is YouTube, to another application of Google, which is Google Earth.  They are trying to attract the attention of Tunisia. They know that they cannot watch the video, but they will be curious to know what is there  and they will try to use a proxy and they will access YouTube by using Tor or using Syphon or any kind of circumvention software.  This is also another kind of sponsor on links as unblockable dissemination of content.  They are using AdSense. They buy some keywords from Google AdSense and then they put some political content there.  So Benali is the book, which means in Arabic enough is enough Benali.  If you Google SMSC, which was the World Summit on Information and Society in Tunisia in 2005, the first result will be the online demonstration against President Benali.  So it's a funny way to play with the sensor in Tunisia.  Okay, you block the Yezi.org website.  We still can publish that information on pro-governmental websites like Tunisipdo and other websites using the technique of Google AdSense and AdWords.  So I think I don't have time anymore, so if you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer that.  Thank you.  I'm sorry we don't have any time for questions anymore.  Thank you very much.  Thank you.
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Hello everybody, thank you for being here. It's about to be finished. So my name is Sami Mogherbiya, I'm from Tunisia and I am a political refugee in the Netherlands. I am also a Global Voices Advocacy Director, I don't know if you know about Global Voices and our project, Defending Online Free Speech Online. So I will talk about the effect of censorship on the content online. We already know what censorship is doing to Internet users. It's obviously that they cannot access the blogger's website and blogs and etc. But we don't know how bloggers and webmasters who have seen their blog or website, how they are dealing with that censorship, how they are finding workaround to create other websites and to make their content available. So I will go through the kind of censorship that is available. We've seen like five major scenarios of censorship. The first one is censorship and censorship is also multi-liers. You have keyword filtering, you have DNS blocking, you have URL blocking and you have also hacking and video attack. So one website is providing a decision content and this content is available online even if the website is being blocked through irises feed, through aggregators, Internet users can still access the content which supposedly is being blocked. So the government like Tunisia, China, Iran and others are really involved in hacking websites, deleting them or carrying out videos attack. The DeepPaget inspection is meant to monitor all kinds of content online and I will go through the case of Tunisia, how the Tunisian government is monitoring, emailing and is removing every kind of political content and replacing that inside the email with spam about how to enlarge your penis or how to use Viagra, etc. And the other kind of censorship is the self-censorship by creating an atmosphere of fear by arresting bloggers that kind of arrest and threat has a big impact on other bloggers who do not blog about politics, who do not criticize the statuque or the regime. They fear that a lot of them stop blocking. And the other one, the most dangerous one is the direct arrest and jailing and sentencing of the blogger and I will go through how we as Global Voices Advocacy were tracking the threat of online free speech. So this is our last project which called Threatnet Voices and it is also a crowdsourcing project in a way that it enables anyone to submit to us a report about bloggers, online writers, digital activists who have been arrested, jailed or threatened and sometimes killed because of their online activity. So it's a project to map the hotspot in the world about places where internet user, blogger and digital activists have been arrested or threatened because of their online activity. And the map is combined with a timeline which is very interactive so you can navigate the map and navigate the timeline, you can go to the past and see where, when exactly bloggers have been arrested and why. And if you go to a country profile, let's say Iran on the sidebar and on the navigation menu you have the list of all countries that we are indexing and if you click on the Iran country profile you will find a list of all bloggers that we know. I'm sure that we are not indexing and covering all bloggers that have been arrested but we are trying and doing our best to put all those cases online and help NGOs and traditional human rights organization find the accurate information and help activists advocate to free and release those bloggers and online activists. And you can see the list and you can see also the timeline that give you like the spike that you see in Iran, the red spike that is the number of the bloggers that have been arrested in Iran during the last post-election process. So by providing this kind of data visualization we will be enabling advocacy and human rights defenders to understand when, where exactly bloggers have been arrested and why. And by doing so we are giving advice actually to activists to be really carefully during major event during election they need to be really anonymous and they need to avoid any kind of keeping some traces like IP addresses or name or geolocation like when they are using Twitter they need to disable geolocation in order to not to give a chance to government to identify them and arrest them. The other thing on the sidebar you can see that submit a report so anyone can click on that and send us information about a blogger. So once we review the blogger and we check all the facts and we go through the internet to check all the information basically we go to reporters on frontier, human rights watch, Amnesty International and also all the information that global voices, huge team of blogger, translator, accurate editor who are providing information globally. So we publish that online if we are sure that the case is really true as a fact are true we publish that. We provide a link to the blogger, we provide the date of his arrest and if he's released it also the date of his release and if available we provide a link to the blog or the website that is advocating for his release. So on the sidebar you can see the campaign website by clicking on that badge will go to Frihudar website. In this example I'm talking about Hossain Deraxian the blog father of the Iranian block sphere, the one who's translated the tools and made the Iranian block sphere so powerful he's now in jail. So that's an example simply to raise awareness now about his case. And then we are also providing some data visualization and some graphs to help people especially journalists and human rights advocate to understand when exactly blogger have been arrested what country are really repressive against blogger and digital activists in the world and we provide like the top 10 countries in the world who are really repressive against the blogger and we see here like China, Iran, Egypt, Tunisia and Syria etc are among the top 10 country who are cracking down online free speech especially by arresting and threatening bloggers. And we also provide graphs to understand if the bloggers, how many bloggers are released, how many bloggers are still in jail, how many bloggers are threatened and how many bloggers are really deceased and we have in our database three case of blogger who have been deceased, one of them was killed in jail during torture and the two others have been passed away into there, both Tunisian. So and if you navigate to a country page you will see also the same graphs that give you insight when bloggers, when in which period of the years bloggers get arrested and in Tunisia, this is an example of Tunisia we've seen in 2009 two bloggers have been arrested during the election in Tunisia but unfortunately the media, the big media, the mainstream media only focus Iran and China are very high, very sexy actually in the human rights feed but they never talk about what's happening in Tunisia or in Mauritania where bloggers also have been arrested during election. So and playing with the data we can really find out a lot of amazing stuff. We can discover that the Arab world is the most repressive region in the world toward bloggers. So like here 41% of the bloggers that we are indexing on our website are from the Arab world and if we add Iran to the Arab world and we are talking now about the Middle East in general, we see that 55% of the bloggers worldwide who have been threatened are from the Middle East. So we can play with the data in all ways and this is a funny way that our friend from Global Voice is a blogger and as Tise have compared the years that Ben Ali or Assad or Mubarak have stayed in power and the number of bloggers who have been arrested there and it's funny to see and to discover that the number of the years for presidents in power is almost equal to the number of bloggers that have been arrested. So it's a funny way to play with the data and we are about to release the API of this database to enable all kinds of websites, especially journalists and human rights advocates to display the data and connect with our database and make it visible on their website as well. So now we go back to the censorship and repression. Are they really against the content? Are they killing the content online? What happened when the blogger gets arrested? What happens to his blog? So here I provide two examples. The first one is from Saudi Arabia, a blogger called Fouad Al Farhan who got arrested because of his support first to the reformist movement in Saudi Arabia and especially because of one of his most recent posts before his arrest was about 10 personalities in Saudi Arabia that he does not like and he does not want to meet. And among those 10 personalities was the Prince of Saudi Arabia and a minister. So after that post Fouad Al Farhan got arrested. So that's a screenshot of his blog I got from thearchive.org because the blog, as you can see on the right side, is unavailable. The second screenshot is from a website of Iranian blogger, human rights activist and feminist who was arrested because of her online activity. And if you visit her blog now, you will see that screenshot on the right side. This is only two examples and you can see dozens and dozens. If you navigate Threatened Voices and you click on the link to the blogs of those arrested and threatened voices you will discover that I can't give any percentage of how many blogs are dead but I can assure you that dozens and dozens of bloggers do not blog anymore because of the repression that they faced. This is a map, a network of the digital activist in Tunisia. The map was done by my friend from the Netherlands, Fika Janssen, studying the digital activism in the Arab world. And it draws the kind of network that exists in that country, in the cyberspace of that country. And we can see the clusters and which websites and blogs are the most important in that map. So like here in the middle there is a big dot, the white one, the web.go.org which is providing all kinds of links to all the other clusters of the cyberspace, digital cyberspace in Tunisia. And I should also point out that all those dots are blocked in Tunisia. All the websites and blogs that are talking about politics and that are critical to the government are blocked. But if we add the filter of dead websites we see all the black dots that you see on the map are blogs and websites that do not exist anymore. So this kind of effect is having on the cyberspace in Tunisia. And as I said we cannot prove that censorship is really killing content. We need to make a comparison, another study to see if the websites and blogs who are not blocked and censored are also really dead. So we need to go deeper in this study. The digital methods initiative from the University of Amsterdam are trying to provide a tool that will help us crawl and understand, let's say, 200 links and analyze them and find out if those blogs and websites are dead. And by dead I mean that they are not updated anymore, that the DNS does not exist anymore, that the website is being hacked by spammer and user to provide a sponsor on the link, etc. And I will go through a few examples to let you see how this phenomenon is having a huge impact on free speech online. So from the examples of the map of the digital activism in Tunisia that I displayed, 34% are dead websites. And these are an example of the Tunisian website of Lalik Tunisian, the screenshot is from the archive.org as well. And now if you go to the link of that website you will find out that it's becoming a Chinese website. I don't know how a Tunisian website which is providing content in Arabic and French and in English is becoming a Chinese website. I really don't know how this kind of stuff is happening. This is another example from a major human rights NGO in Tunisia, Conseil National pour la liberté en Tunisie. And if you visit his link now you will see a website providing a sponsored link and buying and selling stuff. This is another example from another human rights NGO in Tunisia as well. This is screenshot from archive.org and now if you visit that link you will see that the DNS is reserved but there is no content on that website. This is another kind of killing content online. Tunisia, China and Iran are using DeepBugget inspection and fortunately the software and the tools that they are using to do that keyword filtering are provided by Western companies. We've heard about Simons and Nokia in Iran but we never heard about smart filter, secure computing, McAfee in Tunisia, Saudi Arabia in Sudan, in the United Arab Emirates, etc. Iran and China are very sexy and high issues but other part of the world are really not raised as repressive to the human rights. So if you Google, if users Google and try to look to search for a word like Tunisia and censorship, they will find those images but there are few websites like nowet.org, Tunisie news.net and Global Voices are filtered. All the images that are being hosted on those websites are not to see on Google, on Yahoo, on Bing and all the other search engines. This is another example of the DeepBugget inspection and this is a newsletter that is being sent daily by the popular Tunisie news website. If you can see the first screenshot is from an email that you can read outside of Tunisia but if you are inside of Tunisia, you will see the other email, an email which is talking about how to enlarge your penis. So what the Tunisian government is doing is filtering all the emails that are going through the network in Tunisia and once they found something which is politically engaged or critical, they removed that content and replaced it with spam actually. So this is another kind of killing content through email, not on the web. So in general, the consequences of censorship, how do they affect online free speech and especially how do they affect bloggers and webmasters? So first the short term is the bloggers gain some visibility. They became popular but not all of them. I mean the most popular bloggers have the media coverage but if you are an unknown blogger, if you are from countries that are marginalized in the mainstream media, no one will talk about you. Few websites like Global Voices and other initiative will talk about your case and try to raise awareness. But in general, big media, Washington Post, CNN, York Times, even hearing in Germany or in France, Le Monde, Le Figaro, they won't talk about that. It's not interesting, it's not sexy. This information don't say. So but on the long term, bloggers will find themselves alone. They need to deal with that censorship. What to do next? And the most important goal of censoring a blogger or dissident writer online is to isolate him from his readership, from his natural environment. So once you get your blog is blocked, you will lose your readership first. And then you will lose the conversation. No one will comment on your blog because they cannot access it from that country. Well, if your fellow friend or bloggers are living abroad, they can still access that blog and go on with the conversation. But the main readership, your main audience, the target group, that is the goal of your blogging activity cannot access anymore your blog. So actually the conversation is dead. The content is dead if your blog and website is being blocked. And then there is a shift from blocking to protesting. I mean, once you get blocked, you will protest censorship. If you was focusing on social justice, if you were blogging about environment, if you was blogging about human rights abuse, you won't talk about those issues anymore. You will focus on censorship on your free speech and will try to get it back. So bloggers will lose their editorial freedom and the government will impose another editorial line which is protesting censorship, which is not effective because your blog is not any more accessible from within your country. And we've seen that a lot of bloggers are becoming activists once they get arrested. And there is a theory coined by our colleague and friend Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices, which is the QtCAD theory, which means that once bloggers and internet users cannot access websites for fun, they cannot go to Flickr to see a picture of QtCAD, they cannot access YouTube to see a funny movie and laugh about that content. If they cannot do that anymore, a tiny percentage of those internet users will become politically active against the government, which is funny actually, but it is very bad because you are changing the nature of the internet behavior from free and normal behavior to a politically behavior. And then bloggers, once their blog or website gets blocked, they doubt about the meaning of blogging. If you lose your readership, if no one will come to your blog or website to publish a comment, so while you are writing actually, who is your audience, you still, you start doubting about blogging, few bloggers stop blogging, few other will practice self-censorship. They will create another blog and they will avoid talking about any kind of political or sensitive issues. And now we will go to the scenario, the technical scenario that are there available for bloggers and webmasters to deal with censorship. So, creating once your domain name is blogged or the link to your blogspot blog or WordPress blog or LiveJournal is blogged, the easiest way and the simplest solution is to create another blog, which is very, very easy. I mean, you can go to blogspot or to WordPress and in five minutes you set up a new blog, but you will lose the page ranking of your old blog, you will lose all the incoming links from search engine, from major blogs, maybe from mainstream media that are linking to your blogged blog, you will lose them. And then you can migrate to another blog. I mean, if you are blogging on blogspot and your blog got blocked, it's very easy to migrate to WordPress because WordPress has that capacity to import your XML file from blogspot to WordPress. If you are using Spip, a French CMS platform, if you are using TypePad, if you are using any kind of local publishing software, you cannot anymore import that content from that platform to another platform. And if you can, you need some technical knowledge. So this kind of technique is not accessible for anyone, it is only accessible for people who have some technical skill. A redirecting to another domain name, which is also very easy. I mean, if they blog your domain name, let's say myblog.com, you can create another domain name, you can buy it, mysecondblog.com. And then with a simple tweaking of the DNS or another file on your FTP server, you can redirect the old link to the new link. But also this is technically difficult for people who do not have any kind of technical knowledge. And also it's impossible for people who do not have a hosting server. If you are blogging on blogspot, you can do that. Because blogspot offers you the possibility to edit the template of your blog. And you can put JavaScript on the header of the template that will redirect automatically all visitors and all links from search engines, etc. So you can do that. If you are blogging on the popular wordpress.com, you cannot do that because wordpress.com does not offer this kind of editing option inside the platform. Setting up a mirror blog. A lot of blogs get blocked and then they create another blog and they mirror the content of the blog to the other blog, which is very easy to do, but only for people who have advanced technical knowledge as well. It's not affordable for all bloggers. I think maybe only 5 or 10% of bloggers can do this, but the rest cannot deal with this kind of mirroring techniques. And there is another way of becoming exiled blogger. We've seen it in Saudi Arabia, we've seen it in Egypt, we've seen it in Tunisia. We've seen it in all those countries engaged in internet censorship that once the blogger got blocked, he started publishing his article on another blog. So his friend, his fellow bloggers will host his content, but this is temporarily you won't give completely your blog to another blogger. It's very personal blog, it's your blog. So this kind of solution is only for a short period of time. And the other way is relying on major websites. A lot of bloggers once their blog got blocked, they start publishing their content on Facebook. They start publishing their photo or their video on YouTube, on Flickr, and they start tweeting. But that is also very limited because there is a kind of censorship with targeting specific pages on Facebook. Bahrain is doing this, Tunisia is doing this. I think China and other places are doing the same. So if you are politically very active on Facebook, it is very easy for the government to block your page. The other is self-censorship. You won't talk about any kind of political issue. And the other is stop blocking. And we've seen that a lot of bloggers, once they get blocked, they stop blogging at all. But there is the micro pipeline as unblockable system. If you publish your stuff, but also this kind of technique is only available for people who have some technical knowledge, who are following the trends of the web. So if you send an email to Posteros, Posteros will automatically publish that content and will send it automatically as well to YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, etc. Which is very automated and easy and you will make the censor crazy because you cannot understand anymore from where you are publishing and where you are publishing. So a lot of activists in Tunisia and other countries are using this technique and they are making this kind of mouse and cat and mouse game with the government. Okay, you block my blog, I will publish on Posteros and Posteros will publish automatically my content to ten other platforms. Which is very, very funny way. But again, this kind of technique does not work against keyword filtering. I mean, if you are using, let's say, democracy and Tunisia is filtering that word. Even if you publish the same content on ten other websites, the same content will still be blocked and inaccessible in Tunisia. So that's why I say this technique is very useful, but it's also not working all the time and everywhere. This is an example of cross-posting through WordPress, to Twitter, to Facebook and to other platforms, used by the Nowel.org. This is also another technique used by Nowel.org on Google Earth and Google and YouTube by publishing your video on YouTube and by Jio tagging those videos on YouTube by giving a place, a location to those videos by doing that, actually you are cross-publishing the same content on Google Earth and Google Map. So if you go to the palace of the president, Penali, in Tunisia, if you navigate and fly to that place on Google Earth, you will notice that the palace, the presidential palace, is surrounded by a lot of videos that are talking about human rights abuse in Tunisia. But those icons are visible, but once you click on them, you cannot watch the video because YouTube is a blog in Tunisia and Daily Motion and VATTV. So they are using this kind of cross-posting from a web site, which is YouTube, to another application of Google, which is Google Earth. They are trying to attract the attention of Tunisia. They know that they cannot watch the video, but they will be curious to know what is there and they will try to use a proxy and they will access YouTube by using Tor or using Syphon or any kind of circumvention software. This is also another kind of sponsor on links as unblockable dissemination of content. They are using AdSense. They buy some keywords from Google AdSense and then they put some political content there. So Benali is the book, which means in Arabic enough is enough Benali. If you Google SMSC, which was the World Summit on Information and Society in Tunisia in 2005, the first result will be the online demonstration against President Benali. So it's a funny way to play with the sensor in Tunisia. Okay, you block the Yezi.org website. We still can publish that information on pro-governmental websites like Tunisipdo and other websites using the technique of Google AdSense and AdWords. So I think I don't have time anymore, so if you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer that. Thank you. I'm sorry we don't have any time for questions anymore. Thank you very much. Thank you.
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