[WSIS CS-Plenary] NY Times article on Internet controls in Tunisia....

[Robert Guerra]

TUNISIA VIEWED AS REPRESSIVE ON INTERNET CONTROLS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/25/international/africa/25tuni.html



June 25, 2004

Tunisia's Tangled Web Is Sticking Point for Reform
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR


TUNIS - Walking toward an Internet cafe in this balmy Mediterranean 
capital, Siham Bensedrine, a journalist and human rights advocate, 
quietly points out the secret police agent regularly assigned to 
watch her building.

She chooses a cafe at some distance from her apartment, lest the 
owner take fright at her surfing the Web with foreign visitors and 
ban her. Once inside, she sits at a terminal beneath several 
intimidating signs. "It is strictly forbidden to connect to banned 
sites,'' reads one in part, while another warns, "The use of any 
diskettes except those provided by the manager is absolutely 
forbidden.''

[...]

To take the Internet as just one example, Tunis has proven itself to 
be perhaps the most repressive Arab government, activists here say. 
Not only are many Web sites blocked, they say, but e-mail is also 
heavily monitored. The ability to offer Web services is kept within a 
small privileged circle. Web cafes are shuttered if deemed too lax 
about monitoring every site visited by patrons. Harsh jail sentences 
are meted out to young men convicted of creating or even visiting 
banned sites.

  The number of Web cafes is shrinking in Tunis because so many have 
been closed.

With more sophisticated filtering techniques that block restricted 
sites far more vigorously, struggling Tunisian publications like 
Kalima resort to the samizdat techniques of the old Soviet Union - 
photocopying their magazines and passing them around clandestinely. 
For the Web versions available outside Tunisia, articles are smuggled 
or e-mailed out piecemeal. "Tunisia is economically liberated, but 
politically we live in the Soviet Union of the 1950's; that is the 
paradox,'' says Souhayer BelHassen, the deputy director of the 
Tunisian League for Human Rights.

  Activists are especially incensed that the United Nations has chosen 
Tunis for the next international conference on information technology 
in November 2005, wondering how a country that so heavily curbs 
Internet access can be used to help showcase its future potential.

[...]

Tunisian officials defend the country's Internet record. They point 
out that the country is advanced in deploying the computer for 
everything from university registration to soccer tickets to paying 
utility bills. They also note that sites that were once blocked, like 
Amnesty International and much of the French press, are now open. 
"The sites that are blocked belong to fundamentalist and terrorist 
groups,'' one Tunisian official said. Those jailed in the Zarzis 
case, he said, were trying to get logistical support from Al Qaeda 
and experimenting with explosives.


-- 
###
Robert Guerra <rguerra at privaterra.org>
Privaterra - <http://www.privaterra.org>