Monday, May 14, 2007

[war on bloggers] first fiji and then …

We don’t live in Fiji under a military dictatorship. Yet. The big worry is whether this can actually, technically, be possible:

The military in Fiji is moving to shut down access to anti-government weblogs after unsuccessful attempts to find those responsible for the sites.

Senior military commander Colonel Pita Driti has told Pacific Radio that access to the sites would be closed down this afternoon. He said they asked that access be cut off to the blog for "national security" reasons.

Asked whether FINTEL would block access to the blogspot.com website, where most of the anti-government sites are hosted, he said the company may have little choice.

The United States has claimed: "On a radio talk show on December 22, Bainimarama stated that if pro-democracy activists did not shut their mouth, the military would shut it for them."

The implication is clear. Blogspot is hosted out of America but Internet service is local. I'm not technically aware enough to know but is it possible for a government of one country to shut down the website of another country?

If so, then the blogosphere is only free until someone decides to shut it down.

6 comments:

  1. They won't shut down the site they will filter it out at the ISPs like China.

    Basically firewalls control the traffic getting through by intercepting a request and either allowing it or just ignoring it. Blogspot does not get the request and thus does not respond and the site comes up as a cannot connect, check you have typed in the correct URL blah, blah....

    It's not foolproof either but it will stop most people.

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  2. Bag is saying you havn't been paying attention James :)

    They ALREADY do this in China and much of the Middle East.

    Luckily my website is ran by blogger, but hosted on MY site heh

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  3. I'm always surprised the straight apatheid that exists in Fiji (against the minority - about 40% - of the population of Indian ethnicity) receives little comment in the UK. Ok so Fiji is an insignificant little country in the back end of beyond in world terms, but it was part of the commonwealth and one in which I'd have thought Britain and the rest of the world should take _some_ interest.

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  4. Wow. That is disturbing.

    I really don't think it'll happen in a Western nation, but you never know...

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  5. I really didn't know the government was so repressive in Fiji. The first thing a dictatorship does is gain control of the media so I suppose bloggers could be targetted. In the US under the "Patriot Act" I imagine politicians could try it - but hope that there would be a public outcry.

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