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In a bid to quash a popular rebellion, the Syrian government has shut down pretty much all electronic communications inside the country and to overseas. Cut off from the internet, protestors, journalists, and human rights activists have resorted to communications networks from another era.

To get the news out, activists have been smuggling videos to Jordan through the desert and across a nearly 80-kilometer border Jordan shares with Syria. Desperate Syrians have been using a helping hand from smugglers to cross the border, either by walking or on the backs of donkeys.

Some risk approaching the border with Jordanian cellphones to report to the outside world and send clips. It is a dangerous task because the Syrian and Jordanian armies traditionally have the area under heavy surveillance to prevent the smuggling of drugs and weapons into the kingdom or further.

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A shocking scene occurred in Tripoli on Saturday when a gun was pointed at Sky News after a woman tried to tell foreign journalists about being raped and tortured by Libyan officials.

A visibly very distressed woman burst into the breakfast room of the hotel where we are staying and attempted to speak out about an ordeal at the hands of Gaddafi supporters.

We were having breakfast in our hotel when the woman broke in and said she'd been picked up at a checkpoint in the city. She claimed she had been held for two days, and that she had been raped and tortured.

As journalists tried to speak to her, things got out of control and the police minders waded in, trying to physically shut her up and stop her talking. The woman was gagged by hand and taken away by minders.

In the commotion a gun was pointed towards the Sky News team in an attempt to stop them filming. A team from another news organisation had their camera smashed in front of them.

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Article/201009115960663

Several sources are reporting Egypt has shut off all internet access ahead of a new wave of anti-government protests are expected to begin. A major service provider for Egypt, Italy-based Seabone, reported early Friday that there was no internet traffic going into or out of the country after 12:30 a.m. local time. The Associated Press reports that the government has "deployed an elite special operations counterterrorism force" to the streets.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/28/0114217/Egypt-Shuts-Off-All-Internet-Access

The UK government has plans to ask ISPs to block all pornography from home internet connections by default. Under the plan, customers would have to ask the ISP for access to pornography. UK’s largest ISPs will be called to a meeting next month to discuss the idea, which is being presented as a way of stopping children from accessing porn. Says Conservative MP Claire Perry: "We are not coming at this from an anti-porn perspective. We just want to make sure our children are not stumbling across things we do not want them to see.”

The US government has just announced that it will be hosting World Press Freedom Day while at the same time trying to squash WikiLeaks. Commenters on the event's Facebook page are having a ball: "Will you be inviting Julian Assange? He's done some fantastic work in this area," wonders one. "This reminds me of the time Iran tried to join the UN womens' rights group," writes another.

State Department spokesman PJ Crowley writes:

The theme for next year's commemoration will be 21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers. The United States places technology and innovation at the forefront of its diplomatic and development efforts. New media has empowered citizens around the world to report on their circumstances, express opinions on world events, and exchange information in environments sometimes hostile to such exercises of individuals' right to freedom of expression.

At the same time, we are concerned about the determination of some governments to censor and silence individuals, and to restrict the free flow of information. We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age.

http://www.connect.connect.facebook.com/WPFD2011/posts/180945228583171

The presumption that governments can conduct their business in secret, out of sight of the populations they represent, died this week. Diplomats and officials are slowly realizing that anything they say may now be one day published on the internet. If a government as technically sophisticated and well protected as the US can suffer a breach of this magnitude, no government is safe. Politicians can demand the prosecution of Julian Assange or that WikiLeaks be designated as a terrorist organisation, but the anger is tacit admission that government's monopoly on its own information is now a thing of the past.

There is in fact only one enduring solution to the WikiLeaks problem, and this is perhaps the goal of WikiLeaks, though this is sometimes hard to discern. That is that governments must close the divide between what they say and what they do. It is this divide that provokes WikiLeaks; it is this divide that will provide ample embarrassment for future leakers to exploit. The only way for governments to save their credibility is to end that divide and at last to do what they say, and vice versa, with the assumption that nothing they may do will remain secret for long. The implications of this shift are profound, and indeed historic.

A wise government would therefore decide – for moral, political and practical reasons – to insist on avoiding secrecy for its own sake. "For when everything is classified, then nothing is classified, and the system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless, and to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or self-promotion ... Secrecy can best be preserved only when credibility is truly maintained." And here we are at his predicted destination. Lead us secretly into one war too many, and see how we wallow in one or another disclosure too many."

What the Wikileaks phenomenon means in the longer term — and how the government will respond — is still open to question. But two things are already clear. First, to reduce incentives for leaks, the government should provide safe avenues for government employees to report abuse, fraud and waste to the appropriate authorities and to Congress. Second, the Obama administration should recommit to the ideals the president invoked when he first came to office: “The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears.”

via WL Central

We are living in an age where a decreasing number of firms serve as a kind of Master Switch over speech on the internet -- think Google, Facebook, the cable industry, and the major telephone carriers. These firms are already under strong pressure to censor from powerful governments, religious groups, political parties, and essentially any outfit with a reason to want information suppressed. On a daily basis, as we speak, internet companies are making speech-related decisions more important than those made by any government.

This is what speech management looks like in 2010. No one elected Facebook or YouTube, and neither one is beholden to the First Amendment. Nonetheless, it is their decisions that dictate, effectively, who gets heard. The American public needs to be aware of the dangers that private censors can pose to free speech. The American Constitution was written to control abuses of power, but it did not account for the heavy concentration of private power that we see today. And in the end, power is power, whether in private or public hands.