How surveillance, trolls, and fear of arrest affect Egypt’s journalists
As Egypt’s crackdown on the press extends to social media and other communication platforms, many journalists say phishing attempts, trolling, software to monitor social media posts, and a draft law that would require registration for social media users are making them think twice before covering sensitive issues.
The issue of targeting journalists online was brought into focus by the NilePhishscam that has targeted more than 110 journalists and activists since 2016–many of them implicated in a large-scale legal case Egypt brought against non-governmental organizations–according to a joint report published by the Toronto-based Citizen Lab and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, a local human rights groups also targeted in the scam.
Through “reverse engineering,” which uses information about the victim to predict their behavior, NilePhish attackers used fake Dropbox and Google Documents invitations to trick victims into entering their account information so hackers could access their communications, according to the report.
Myanmar: One year under Suu Kyi, press freedom lags behind democratic progress
When Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi and her long-persecuted National League for Democracy party won elected office in November 2015, bringing an end to nearly five decades of authoritarian military rule, many local journalists saw the democratic result as a de facto win for press freedom.
Myanmar’s previous military regimes imposed strict restrictions on the media, including a pre-publication censorship system that left any news or commentary even remotely critical of the junta or its commanding officers on news publications’ cutting room floors.
For decades, Myanmar, previously known as Burma, was home to one of Asia’s most repressive media environments, where scores of journalists who dared to shirk the regime’s censorship orders–either under pseudonyms or by filing secretly to exile-run independent media–were sentenced to jail terms in abysmal and often brutal prison conditions.
While those restrictions started to lift under previous President Thein Sein, including an end in August 2012 to pre-publication censorship and the release in November 2012 of political prisoners, including many journalists, in a mass presidential amnesty, self-censorship endured because laws used to stifle free expression and punish dissent remained on the books. In 2013, CPJ’s report “Burma falters, backtracks on press freedom,” found Thein Sein’s military-backed, quasi-civilian government lacked a genuine commitment to a more open press environment.
Continue reading on cpj.org.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, visiting Washington, on Thursday told the American television station CNN that he and his government were “not at war with the press,” in remarks broadcast after his security detail harassed, insulted, and attempted to forcibly eject critical Turkish journalists from a speaking event, according to press reports and videos posted to social media websites.
Read more.
Image: Mahir Zeynalov/Twitter
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buzzfeed:
The three Vice News reporters who were charged with terrorism offenses in Turkey Monday have been transferred to a high-security prison — five hours away from where their legal representation is based, the media organization said Wednesday.
British reporters Philip Pendlebury and Jake Hanrahan and their Turkey-based Iraqi translator and fixer Mohammed Rasool have now been moved to an “f-type” prison following their arrest in the southeastern province of Diyarbakir Thursday.
Kevin Sutcliffe, VICE’s Head of News Programming in Europe, said: “This move appears to be a blatant obstruction of the fair legal process that Turkey has repeatedly pledged to uphold. We call on the Turkish government to throw out these ridiculous charges and immediately release our colleagues.”
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today program on Wednesday morning, Sutcliffe said that Vice had not been able to speak to the journalists following the transfer, and said that the allegations against them “are baseless, they are ridiculous, they are ludicrous.”
A Turkish official, who spoke to Al Jazeera under the condition of anonymity Wednesday, reportedly said that the charges against the three were because one of the journalists had similar encryption software on his personal computer to that used by ISIS.
“The main issue seems to be that the fixer uses a complex encryption system on his personal computer that a lot of ISIL [ISIS] militants also utilize for strategic communications,” the official was quoted by Al Jazeera as saying.
“The US leaks classified information when advantageous, prosecutes when it’s not.”
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Joel Simon, CPJ.
CIA Torture Report via the NYtimes
bbcnewsus:
Syria is the deadliest place for journalists in so far in 2014. The BBC looks at research by the committeetoprotectjournalists about who has bore the brunt of the deadly violence and who is still missing.
gettyimages:
Photographers We’ve Lost In Conflict Zones And Their Work
via @Buzzfeed
James Foley is just the latest photojournalist to be killed while covering the world’s most dangerous wars. Here we look at some of his fellow journalists and their work.
Read the article via @Buzzfeed
Listen to an interview with Getty Images photojournalist Chris Hondros broadcast on NPR on March 26, 2007, as part of the interview ‘A War Photographer’s View of Iraq’
(Photo: A libyan rebel fighter runs up a burning stairwell during an effort to dislodge some ensconced government loyalist troops who were firing on them from an upstairs room during house-to-house fighting on Tripoli Street in downtown Misrata April 20, 2011 in Misrata, Libya. Rebel forces assaulted the downtown positions of troops loyal to Libyan strongman Moammar Gaddafi April 20, briefly forcing them back over a key bridge and trapping several in a building that fought back instead of surrendering, firing on the rebels in the building and seriously wounding two of them during the standoff. Photo by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)
