Immediate Release–New list of Enemies of the Internet

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REPORTERS WITHOUT BORDERS

Beset by online surveillance and content filtering, netizens fight on

Eritrea is among the list of “countries under surveillance”

Read more on Eritrea on http://en.rsf.org/eritrea-eritrea-12-03-2012,42060.html

More information on the full report on 12mars.rsf.org

To mark World Day Against Cyber-Censorship, Reporters Without Borders is today releasing its new list of “Enemies of the Internet” and “countries under surveillance.” This report updates the list released in 2011.

Two countries, Bahrain and Belarus, have passed from the “countries under surveillance” to the “Enemies of the Internet” category. Venezuela and Libya have been dropped from the “under surveillance” category while India and Kazakhstan have been added to it.

“The changes in this list reflect recent developments in online freedom of information,” Reporters Without Borders said. “Netizens have been at the heart of political changes in the Arab world in 2011. Like journalists, they have tried to resist censorship but have paid a high price.

“Last year will be remembered as one of unprecedented violence against netizens. Five were killed while engaged in reporting activity. Nearly 200 arrests of bloggers and netizens were reported in 2011, a 30 per cent increase on 2010. These unprecedented figures risk being exceeded in 2012 as a result of the indiscriminate violence being used by the Syrian authorities in particular. More than 120 netizens are currently detained.

“On World Day Against Cyber-Censorship, we pay tribute to the ordinary citizens who often risk their lives or their freedom to keep us informed and to ensure that often brutal crackdowns do not take place without the outside world knowing.”

Reporters Without Borders added: “As online censorship and content filtering continue to accentuate the Internet’s division and digital segregation, solidarity among those who defend a free Internet accessible to all is more essential than ever in order to maintain channels of communication between netizens and to ensure that information continues to circulate.”

Social networks and netizens versus filtering and surveillance

The last report, released in March 2011, highlighted the fact that the Internet and online social networks had been conclusively established as tools for organizing protests and circulating information in the course of the Arab world’s mass uprisings. In the months that followed, repressive regimes responded with tougher measures to what they regarded as unacceptable attempts to destabilize their authority.

At the same time, supposedly democratic countries continue to set a bad example by yielding to the temptation to put security above other concerns and by adopting disproportionate measures to protect copyright. Technical service providers are under increasing pressure to act as Internet cops. Companies specializing in online surveillance are becoming the new mercenaries in an online arms race. Hactivists are providing technical expertise to netizens trapped by repressive regimes. Diplomats are getting involved. More than ever before, online freedom of expression is now a major foreign and domestic policy issue.

Two new Enemies of the Internet – Bahrain and Belarus

Bahrain and Belarus have joined Burma, China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam in the “Enemies of the Internet” category. These countries combine often drastic content filtering with access restrictions, tracking of cyber-dissidents and online propaganda.

Bahrain offers an example of an effective news blackout based a remarkable array of repressive measures: keeping the international media away, harassing human rights activists, arresting bloggers and netizens (one of whom died in detention), smearing and prosecuting free speech activists, and disrupting communications, especially during major demonstrations.

As Belarus sinks further into political isolation and economic stagnation, President Lukashenko’s regime has lashed out at the Internet in response to an attempted “revolution via the social media.” The Internet was blocked during a series of “silent protests,” the list of inaccessible websites grew longer and some sites were the victims of cyber-attacks. Internet users and bloggers were arrested or invited to “preventive conversations” with the police in a bid to get them to stop demonstrating or covering demonstrations. And Law No. 317-3, which took effect on 6 January 2012, gave the regime additional Internet surveillance and control powers.

India and Kazakhstan added to “under surveillance” list

Since the Mumbai bombings of 2008, the Indian authorities have stepped up Internet surveillance and pressure on technical service providers, while publicly rejecting accusations of censorship. The national security policy of the world’s biggest democracy is undermining online freedom of expression and the protection of Internet users’ personal data.

Kazakhstan, which likes to think of itself as a regional model after holding the rotating presidency of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in 2010, nonetheless seems to be turning its back on all its fine promises in order to take the road of cyber-censorship. An unprecedented oil workers strike helped to increase government tension in 2011 and led to greater control of information. The authorities blocked news websites, cut communications around the city of Zhanaozen during unrest, and imposed new, repressive Internet regulations.

Venezuela and Libya dropped from “under surveillance” list

In Libya, many challenges remain but the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime has ended an era of censorship. Before his removal and death, Col. Gaddafi had tried to impose a news blackout by cutting access to the Internet.

In Venezuela, access to the Internet continues to be unrestricted. The level of self-censorship is hard to evaluate but the adoption in 2011 of legislation that could potentially limit Internet freedom has yet to have any damaging effect in practice. Reporters Without Borders will nonetheless remain vigilant as relations between the government and critical media are tense.

Thailand and Burma may be about to change places

If Thailand continues further down the slope of content filtering and jailing netizens on lèse-majesté charges, it could soon find itself transferred from the “under surveillance” category to the club of the world’s most repressive countries as regards online freedom.

Burma, on the other hand, could soon leave the “Enemies of the Internet” list if takes the necessary measures. It has embarked on a promising period of reforms that have included freeing journalists and bloggers and restoring access to blocked websites. It must now go further by abandoning censorship altogether, releasing the journalists and bloggers still held, dismantling the Internet surveillance apparatus and repealing the Electronics Act.

Other subjects of concern

Other countries have jailed netizens or established a form of Internet censorship. They include Pakistan, which recently invited bids for a national Internet filtering system that would create an Electronic Great Wall. Even if they are not on these lists, Reporters Without Borders will continue to closely monitor online freedom of information in countries such as Azerbaijan, Morocco and Tajikistan.

I salute Meena Kandasamy, each and every domestic Violence survivor needs to read this

  Meena  is my Facebook friend, and I salute her, as it takes extraordinary courage to come out in the open about a  violent and an abusive marriage, I hope this step by Meena ,will give the courage to many such women trapped in such abusive relationships to break their shackles    

‘With sad-woman eyes and soulful smiles’
Meena Kandasamy

In that strange coastal town-city where it rains every morning, I partake of pain as if it is prayer. Married to a violent man who treats me with nothing but distrust and suspicion, my skin has seen enough hurt to tell its own story.In the early days, his words win me back: I don’t have anything if I don’t have you. In this honeymoon period, every quarrel follows a predictable pattern: we make up, we make love, we move on. It becomes a bargain, a barter system. For the sake of survival, I surrender my space.

Two months into the marriage, he cajoles me into parting with my passwords. Soon he answers my e-mails with the same liberty with which he used to select my clothes. Why do you need my password, I ask. You have mine, he says. But I did not ask you for it, I say. You don’t love me enough, he says. Possess me so that I can possess you for possessing me: the thoughts of a possessed, possessive man who has made possession into his single obsession. There can be no secrets when love has become a cruel slave-era overseer. He proposes the idea of a common  e-mail address one week, it is enforced the next. He makes personal boundaries disappear. I am isolated from all my friends and family. As an act of purification, 25,000 e-mail messages are erased on New Year’s Eve. I become the woman with no history.

Soon, in my loveless marriage, sex begins to replicate the model of a market economy: he demands, I supply. Never mind that my response does not matter, never mind that I bleed every single time, never mind that he derives his pleasure from my pain. With a scattered heart and in no mood for seduction, the woman in me carries on a conversation with the ceiling, she confides in the curtains. Faced with so much damage, she seeks pleasure in the flaming forces of nature: harsh sunlight, sudden showers. Secretly, she refuses to be tamed.

The first time he hits me, I remember I hit him back. Retaliation can work between well-matched rivals, but experience teaches me that a woman who weighs less than a hundred pounds should think of other options. It also teaches me other things. I learn that anything can become an instrument of punishment: twisted computer power-cords, leather belts, his bare hands that I once held with all the love in the world. His words sharpen his strikes. If I deliver a quick blow, your brains will spill out, he says. His every slap shatters me. Once, when he strangulates me, I imbibe the silence of a choked throat.

And when I tell him that I want to walk out of the marriage, he wishes me success in a career as a prostitute, asks me to specialise in fellating, advices me to use condoms. I shrink and shrivel and shout back and shed a steady stream of tears. He smiles at his success. He wants me to feel like a fallen woman. He always inhabits the moral high ground and resorts to extreme generalisations: literary festivals are brothels, women writers are whores, my poetry is pornography. His communist credentials crumble. He faults me for being a feminist. I am treated with the hatred that should be reserved for class enemies.

As fear seeps into my body, sex becomes unto submission. in this role of a wife, I remember nothing except the relief of being let go, being let off after being used up… I am no longer myself… I think death will put an end to this.

As a bored housewife, I colour-code the domestic violence: fresh red welts on my skin, the black hue of blood clots, the fading violet of healed bruises. It appears that there is no escape from this unending cycle of abuse, remorse-filled apology and more abuse. One day, when I am whipped with a belt and cannot take it anymore, I threaten him with police action. He retorts that no man in uniform will respect me after reading a line of my verse. He challenges me to go to anyone anywhere. I have no friends in that small world—only his colleagues who think the world of him and his students who worship the earth on which he walks. I do not know whom to trust, even our neighbours could hand me back to him. In the middle of the night, I want to rush to a nearby convent, seek shelter. Would I be understood? Would it work out? How far can I run away in a city that does not speak my tongue, a city where young women in bars are beaten up?

I tell him that I cannot live with him any longer. I tell him that I have lost count of the last chances I have given him.

The next morning I wake up and see that he has singed his flesh with a red-hot spoon. A twisted mind and its twisted love. He is willing to explain himself: I inflict this punishment on myself because I realise my guilt. I did this because I love you. In other words: you made me hurt you, you made me hurt myself. The subtext: please take the blame, please take the beatings too. I am held hostage emotionally. I crave for a freedom that will just let me be me, I flounder to find the words to help me speak my story. I live in a house of slamming doors and broken dreams. I am no longer myself, I am convinced that I am starring in somebody’s tragic film. I look forward to dying, I think death will put an end to this.

As fear seeps into my body, sex becomes submission, and in this role-play of being a wife, I remember nothing except the relief of being let go, being let off after being used up. In this marriage of martyrdom, kisses disappear.

We sleep in separate rooms. Every night, my heart sings a sad song. I long for tenderness. I circle around my sorrow as if it were a village goddess, I feed it my bruised flesh. Come and get me,
I cry. No one hears me, it is just me screaming in my head. I manage to pull myself together because I have vowed never to break.

I grow distant, we grow apart.

I later uncover his double life: he has been previously married, a fact concealed even by his own family members. He has not yet divorced his first wife. When I confront him, he attempts to explain everything scientifically and then comes right back at me. There is more name-calling, hair-pulling, badmouthing, blackmailing. He begins to beat me. He brands me a bitch. I will skin you alive, he says, and then call your father to come and get you. I am numb, too traumatised to react. That night, I am thrown out, like trash. I leave home with a handbag and a bad-girl tag. I plead with the paramilitary personnel at the airport to let me sleep there, they ask me a thousand questions but allow me to stay. One of them buys me dinner. I fly back to Chennai the next morning. I have no words to tell my parents. They ask no questions. My mother hugs me with the air of a woman who will never let me go. My sister is angry why I ever left her.

Weeks later, I consult lawyers. They tell me that my marriage is not valid, that seeking a divorce is a pointless exercise. As an act of mercy, even the law has set me free. When I press for his punishment, the police speak of jurisdictional issues. You lived elsewhere, they say. Lady justice does not serve displaced women.

It is more than a month since I moved back to my parents’ place. I talk to my well-wishers. I wear my sister’s clothes. I weep, alone, at night. I look back at those four months of my life and realise that what I had lived through was not “my life” at all, but something that someone else had charted for me. Wedded to a wife-beater, I never believed that I would live to tell my tale. I console myself that now I have first-hand experience of brutality: a story of struggle and survival that I can share on unfair days. Such empty consolations soothe violated bodies. I join a lucky league of battered women who find comfort in the safe zone of family, solace in the warmth of friends and flirtatious strangers who nurse my wounds with words. Can I overcome this nightmare of a marriage? I don’t have straight answers. I have learnt my lessons. I know that I am single and safe now. With sad-woman eyes and soulful smiles, I strive to find the courage to face this world. Perhaps, along the way, poetry will help me leave the pain behind.

( The first person account appears in magazine ‘ outlook ”

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Profiteer Vedanta will destroy tribals and spawn Maoists

Kondh Lady (Photo credit: ramesh_lalwani)

ETHICS & POWER
RAM JETHMALANI– in Sunday Guardian

A woman from the Dongria Kondh tribe watches a gathering near the Niyamgiri hills to protest against plans by Vedanta Resources to mine bauxite from that mountain near Lanjigarh in Orissa on 23 February 2010. (REUTERS)

he low, flat-topped hills of south Orissa have been home to the Dongria-Kondh tribe before there was a country called India or a state called Orissa. The Kondh worshipped and watched over the hills as living deities; the hills made their life possible. The Niyamgiri hills are covered by cool forests which induce moderate rainfall, and provide water for the rivers and rivulets that flow from them and irrigate the lands below. The hills, ancient and only home of the Kondh, have been sold to a company, called Vedanta, British, but owned by Anil Aggarwal, the Indian billionaire who lives in London in a mansion that once belonged to the Shah of Iran.

Vedanta is after the tribes of Orissa, their hearth and home and their pots and pans. The destruction of ecology, disturbance of environmental harmony and the death and destitution of lakhs of Dongra-Kondh are imminent.

Vedanta’s response is cruel: Why not? It is only the price of progress. America, Europe and Australia have a history of killing indigenous populations: why not India?

The Niyamgiri hills have been sold for their bauxite while Government has announced an Operation Green Hunt, a war purportedly against the Maoist terrorists headquartered in the jungles of Central India. In reality, it is a cruel, avaricious and corrupt war against the landless, the Dalits, workers, peasants and weavers of the region. These weak, downtrodden, almost-forgotten people are pitted against a juggernaut of injustice by a cruel society and corrupt politicians. I regret that even the Supreme Court, presided over by a Dalit Chief Justice is unwittingly supportive of a policy which involves wholesale corporate takeover of these people’s land and resources.{ Maoists draw their power from the atrocities perpetrated on the poor. Corrupt Governments are not the solution. They are the problem. Society has to reform itself and eliminate insane, caste-ridden cruelty.

ear what Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh has had to say. Two and half years ago he said, “Maoists are the single largest internal security threat to the country.” On 6 January 2009 he thought that Maoists had only modest capabilities. On 18 June 2009, at a meeting of state Chief Ministers and in Parliament he was more forthright about what he really felt: “If left wing extremism continues to flourish in parts which have natural resources of minerals, the climate for investment would certainly be affected.” Does it not sound like a sell-out to crony capitalism?

Of course one condemns the  violence of the Maoists. The recent atrocity which killed more than 70 of our guardians of law and order must be condemned. But let us not forget that in 2004, when the ban on the Peoples’ War Group (the earlier incarnation of Maoists) was lifted in Andhra Pradesh, their rally was attended in Warangal by 15 lakh Indian citizens. Maoists draw their power from the atrocities perpetrated on the poor who, decimated by overwhelming force, have been forced to flee into the jungles of Chhattisgarh and join the comrades already working there.

Read more here

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Chhattisgarh SP’s suicide: Ghosts of Dantewada

Javed Iqbal | Tuesday, March 13, 2012, DNA

On March 12, Rahul Sharma, superintendent of police, Bilaspur, shot himself in the head with his service revolver. Some cite personal problems, others feel he was under severe pressure from his superiors.

I first met him on April 3, 2009, when motorcycle-borne Maoists had gunned down Channu Karma, a relative of Mahendra Karma, in broad daylight, just a few kilometres away from the police station at Dantewada. I had taken the above photograph of the witness of the crime, who sat distraught, holding his head, unable to talk. Rahul Sharma (framed by the window) then the Superintendent of Police of Dantewada, had entered the scene of the crime, and instantly called someone in Raipur, and in a calm demeanour, described the situation and everything that was being done by his department to handle yet another political assassination in Dantewada. He would later ask me where I had come from, and I replied I came from Mumbai. I would live in Dantewada for months under his office.

A few days later, on April 11, an alleged encounter had taken me to the village of Goomiyapal, then to Hiroli, then Samalwar, where the police had claimed to have killed three Maoists in the forest, yet the dirt roads leading away from the village of Samalwar were filled with pools of blood. The villagers too claimed that three people were taken away by the police from Samalwar and that there was no encounter in the forest.

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Lets Vote- “Faking Happiness “- Spoof Ad Competition in reply to Vedanta’s ‘ Creating Happiness”

In today’s times when much of media is sold out to corporates, the only voices that show the truth of malpractices of various mining giants are a few activists and documentary filmmakers. Vedanta‘s strategy to organize a film competition on their ‘community initiatives’ is such a fool proof masking of their real face. By organizing such a film competition and sponsoring 114 students from top media and film schools in the country including FTII, Whistling Woods, Symbiosis, School of Convergence, MGR FTI, IIMC, Assam University, Xavier’s, Christ University, AAFT, ZIMA, Tezpur University, IP College and Ravenshaw to produce films on itself…Vedanta knows how to make opinions about itself and how to control the ‘could be’ voices of future.

With jury panel consisting of Shyam Benegal and Gul Panag , who have withdrwan now , the jury only has piyush pandey .

The ad you can see here

Objective- This campiagn is to UNMASK the TRUE FACE of corporates, which they tend to hide beautifully through their r CSR AD FILMS fool people, while on one hand they indulge in human rights violations on other hand they glorify their peice meal appraoch of CSR criminal corporations using these feel good advts, need to eb EXPOSED, and that what precisely the ” faking happiness’ campaign intends to do

You see an AD Print, Video which you feel is blatantly lying about their work and using it as an image building method, you make a spoof of that ad and send to us at

CATEGORIES

1. ad films

2printad

3. any other

The entries have be added in the sub pages here, each entry is in a page so you can like it and give a vote once,

In some cases wherein the entry cannot be embedded you need to go to the link, hence .. the entries by one person will be in one page and if you like anyone entries or more, you can vote in the comment

so lets rock and roll 🙂

The Entries are below

faking-happiness-nakul-sawhney

faking-happiness-coke-manasi-pingle

vedanta-faking-happiness-rizvi-amir-abbas-syed

vedanta-spoof-movie-sundeep-narwani-and-team

faking-happiness-animations-surya-shankar-dash

faking-happiness-animations-kamayani-bali-mahabal

faking-happiness-print-ads-rizvi-amir-abbas-syed

faking-happiness-fair-and-lovely-ad-shrungar

faking-happines-coco-cola-mohammad-zafar

faking-happines-crocodile-in-water-tiger-on-land-a-non-profit-equal-opportunity-collection