Egypt Fights Terrorism By Censoring Web Sites, Threatening Jail Time For Accessing Them (apnews.com)

An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press: Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has ratified an anti-cybercrime law that rights groups say paves the way for censoring online media. The law, published Saturday in the country's official gazette, empowers authorities to order the blocking of websites that publish content considered a threat to national security. Viewers attempting to access blocked sites can also be sentenced to one year in prison or fined up to EGP100,000 ($5,593) under the law. Last month, Egypt's parliament approved a bill placing personal social media accounts and websites with over 5,000 followers under the supervision of the top media authority, which can block them if they're found to be disseminating false news.
"Authorities say the new measures are needed to tackle instability and terrorism," reports the BBC.

"But human rights groups accuse the government of trying to crush all political dissent in the country."

Comments

New Slogan

[StikyPad]

Egypt: Come for the antiquities, stay because you got black bagged at the airport for insulting Egypt.

Egypt Fights Terrorism Threatening Jail For Sites

[grep -v '.*' *]

Egypt Fights Terrorism By Censoring Web Sites, Threatening Jail Time For Accessing Them

INFORMATION wants to be free!
Apparently you do not wish the same.

So you have:

• the Great Firewall of China, where you can't get there from here. (vs VPNs, offline)
• You've got Egypt, where they're watching where you go. (DNS? Packet inspection? Web site logs?)
• You've got Banned Books apparently in the US which removes or restricts access to paper books.
• You've got the Index Librorum Prohibitorum from the Church which apparently isn't updated any more. (June 1966 maintained its moral force but no Spanish Inquisition visits.)
• The Satanic Verses resulted in a fatwa calling for Rushdie's death.

I'm sure there are other lists out there (Holy Bible, Mein Kampf, others.) My, there's a lot of naughty ideas out there. OTOH if you're actively promoting violence ("let's kill all of the bastards at noon tomorrow in the city") that's a little different.

The bazaar of ideas shouldn't exchange books and paper for bullets and knives. And it doesn't, only marginalized PEOPLE do. Maybe there's a reason you're marginalized. Maybe there's not. But I suspect it's much easier to become that way if you've got "nothing else to lose" and "the bastards are going to hear me now!"

Re:Egypt Fights Terrorism Threatening Jail For Sit

[monkease]

You've got Banned Books [bannedbooksweek.org] apparently in the US which removes or restricts access to paper books.

I agree with your general sentiment, but you've got Banned Books Week very wrong. Take another look at your link :)

Re: Web Sites are Tools of Infidels

[blindseer]

Right, because the best way to keep people quiet about government conspiracies is to shut down news networks.

By the way, how is Alex Jones doing now? Seems like the attempts to "de-platform" him is only making him more popular. He was a nobody until these new media platforms tried to shut him down, and now everyone knows his name.

Re:Keep talking...

[gtall]

The Right doesn't need any "bans" to "prove" there is a conspiracy. Just listen to them, they will generate any sort of "conspiracy" from nothing regardless of what is happening. They exist by mutually recursive backscratching. Some idiot gins up a plot by connecting some random dots, another cites the first as proof and adds a few more dots, a few more cite the first ones as incontrovertible evidence of the plot. Then Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Fox, etc. take over and trumpet the plot citing the first idiots.

The Left could curl up and die and they'd still be ginning up ridiculous "plots", they have no other recourse for existence and a paycheck. Tyrants everywhere use this script.