Censorship Increases in Mideast, North African Countries

GlobalTracker| Our overnight traffic in Lubna Hussein was stunning, but I don’t know why. I have no word from her associates, so I assume that perhaps CNN’s article Report: Mideast, North African countries censor, control media is making the Internet circuit is an article getting noticed.

The IPI Press Review 2009 Focus on the Middle East and North Africa talks of growing, not lessening, censorship in the region. I can tell you that Anne of Carversville is now blocked in Iran because of my writing and work in the Lubna Hussein trial and also Chansa Kabwela.

Our traffic out of the country has withered to zero, and I cannot access websites inside Iran that I formerly did. With a different IP addy, presumably I could get in. 

Indeed, the Internet has emerged as a challenge to officialdom and we are effective. When Lubna Hussein was in the courtroom in Sudan, there was a team of people, some I still don’t know except for their screen names, because there is no need for me to know.

What happened in Lubna’s case is that a journalist in her courtrom sent a message in Arabic to a third party, probably in Egypt, who translated the message and sent it to me, where I had it on Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and Anne of Carversville in minutes (5am my time here in NYC).

These are the forces at play in the world today. Read on at CNN.