• free speech: blogging

Spirit of America has launched the BlogSafer wiki, available at http://www.blogsafer.org. BlogSafer contains a series of guides on how to blog under difficult conditions in countries that discourage free speech ...

In past several years at least 30 people have been arrested, many of whom have been tortured, for criticizing their governments. This trend is likely to increase in the coming year.

 

The five guides that are currently on the wiki serve bloggers in the following countries:

 

• Iran (in Persian)
• China (Chinese)
• Saudi Arabia (in Arabic—also useful for other Arabic-speaking regimes such as Bahrain, Egypt, Syria and Tunisia)
• Malaysia (in English—also applicable to neighboring Indonesia and Singapore)
• Zimbabwe (in English—applicable to English-speaking Africans as well as aid workers)
  

These countries were chosen because they are representative of the kinds of repressive tactics that have been used in the past several years against bloggers. These include filtering, interrogation, torture and imprisonment.

I've just read the Anonymous Blogging Guide - Malaysia and it does seem to me to be an excellent introduction to anonymous blogging. The range of technologies available to evade detection is impressive and growing. This extract from the conclusion summarises the political goal and  the technologies employed. Read the whole thing and the resource guide if you want to explore or use the technologies more for yourself:

You have a right to be heard. Your voice is important to Malaysia, both for its present and its future. However, contradicting the accepted common truths of a nation can be frowned upon, and a government that is on the defensive politically can be challenging to those who wish to add their voices to the discussion of their country’s future. Someone who cares about this future can do no good mute. You must remain in possession of your voice.

To that end, we have covered basic anonymization measures, such as pseudonymous blogging and web-based email; proxies; social options, such as individual Circumventor proxies, Adopt-a-Blog and assisted blogging; Tor servers’ onion routing; and very complex email-based blogging systems like Invisiblog.

Globalisation, the internet, free speech ... these all seem like very good things to me.

Residents of a fishing village near Hong Kong said that as many as 20 people had been killed by paramilitary police in an unusually violent clash that marked an escalation in the widespread social protests that have roiled the Chinese countryside. Villagers said that as many as 50 other residents remain unaccounted for since the shooting. It is the largest known use of force by security forces against ordinary citizens since the killings around Tiananmen Square in 1989. That death toll remains unknown, but is estimated to be in the hundreds ...

The use of live ammunition to put down a protest is almost unheard of in China, where the authorities have come to rely on rapid deployment of huge numbers of security forces, tear gas, water cannons and other non-lethal measures. But Chinese authorities have become increasingly nervous in recent months over the proliferation of demonstrations across the countryside, particularly in heavily industrialized eastern provinces like Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiansu. By the government's tally there were 74,000 riots or other significant public disturbances in 2004, a big jump from previous years ...

Like the Dongzhou incident itself, most of the thousands of riots and public disturbances recorded in China this year have involved environmental, property rights and land use issues. Among other problems, in trying to come to grips with the growing rural unrest, the Chinese government is wrestling with a yawning gap in incomes between farmers and urban dwellers, and rampant corruption in local government, where unaccountable officials deal away communal property rights, often for their own profit.

Finally, mobile telephone technology has made it easier for people in rural China to organize, communicating news to one another by short messages, and increasingly allowing them to stay in touch with members of non-governmental organizations in big cities who are eager to advise them or provide legal help.

- New York Times Report