Drawing a crowd

No fatwa against Facebook, Indonesian clerics rule. That's the story from the Jakarta Post after authorities blocked an Everybody Draw Mohammed page that linked to cartoons of the prophet that even "moderate" Muslims would dislike, the paper said.

Facebook is merely a tool, the clerics decided.

Molly Norris's idea for the freedom of expression event achieved its purpose: the right of people who don't subscribe to certain religious beliefs was resoundingly upheld in democratic societies.

FoxNews, the New York Times and other media covered the event -- especially after Pakistan blocked Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia, which has a page about yesterday's event. Pakistani young people, who use Facebook extensively, were unhappy over the decision

Norris, however, backed away from the event, apologizing for offending Muslims. At one point, she said she had received death threats. Still, she told one reporter that she was pleased to have instituted a debate.

Pakistan, as the New York Times notes today, is far from being the only country to crimp internet usage.  Thailand blocked YouTube in 2007 over content considered disrespectful of the king; Google moved its Chinese search engine to Hong Kong; Turkey bars YouTube for months on end over content supposedly disrespectful of Turkey's modern founder Ataturk; and of course Iran is notorious for its anti-protest control systems.

The Jakarta Post also reports that Indonesian journalists are planning to set up a site modeled on WikiLeaks in order to publish documents and evidence that the conventional media won't touch.

Net nanny collusion? On April 9, the internet server for Germany-based WikiLeaks.de shut down the site, claiming contract violation. The next day wikileaks.org posted a notice theorizing that the site had been shut down because WikiLeaks had published Australia's proposed secret blacklist of web sites, and German, who are also blacklist-minded, wanted to show who is boss.

I haven't checked the list but one writer says a number of sites on the Aussie list, rather than being pornographic, are political.

WikiLeaks says its functions are up and running outside Germany and that Germans can reach WikiLeaks via a number of mirror sites.

An unconfirmed report yesterday said that German authorities had seized the domain and that it was under control by them.

A WikiLeaks founder has complained recently of harassment by Australian authorities (see a recent post).

A useful May 19 report on WikiLeaks appeared in the Washington Post. It can also be reached via the Post or WikiLeaks.

My position: "patrol is better than control." Prosecute those involved in unlawful conduct, such as child porn trafficking, but keep government hands off web site linkages. Religious and cultural groups should be encouraged to establish private net filtering system and urge their followers to subscribe.

There's a lot of suspicion about the extent of control BP is exercising over the investigative aspects of the Gulf oil spill. For example, the lab handling much environmental testing does most of its business with the oil industry, one expert told the New York Times. The NOAA has instructed that lab samples be processed by that firm, we learn.

The World Wild Web... "It's a wild, wild world out there," one cybersecurity marketer told blogger David White, who discusses the burgeoning of cybercrime as web sites grow more complex. People can be hoodwinked by authentic-looking sites which take credit card and other information through interactive apps.

The reason for including cybersecurity issues on this blog is because censors employ cyber disruption techniques. A few weeks back, I received an email, purportedly from Gmail, asking that I "verify" my account information, including my password. This was about the time journalists disliked by Chinese communists were targets of password attacks. I sent a response asking how I could be sure the letter came from Google. No response was receieved.