I found this arresting chart on Swivel. It plots the number of bloggers who have been incarcerated over the past few years, based on data collected by the World Information Access project. The number of incidents it tracks went from five arrests in 2003 to 35 last year. As blogging expands internationally, so do the risk of speaking one’s mind. (Something many of us take for granted).
Most of those arrests are in countries with oppressive regimes, such as Egypt, China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. But bloggers have been arrested in Canada, France, Greece, and even the U.S. (with Josh Wolf being one of the most famous incidents—he spent the better part of a year in jail for refusing to turn over journalistic video footage to a grand jury).
A few involve cases of alleged terrorism or pedophilia, but the majority involve some form of political speech. Some typical examples:
Reza Valizadeh (Iran; November, 2007). “For revealing Iranian president’s overpriced dogs that his security team uses.”
Charles Leblanc (Canada; June, 2006): “For taking pictures at a conference for his blog.”
Josh Wolf (USA; August, 2006): “For videotaping a burning police car.”
Hu Jia (China; December, 2007): “For posting his vocal critiques of human rights abuses and environmental degradation in China and calling the Olympics a ‘human rights disaster.’”
Reza Valizadeh (Iran; November, 2007): “For revealing Iranian president’s overpriced dogs that his security team uses.”
Nay Phone Latt (Burma; January, 2008): “For posting pictures of monks and people demonstrating on the streets.”
I’ve uploaded a spreadsheet with the names of all 64 arrested bloggers tracked by the WIA that includes their country, date of arrest, and reason for arrest. These do not include people arrested for impersonating someone else on Facebook or unfortunate enough to be beaten to death during an arrest.
Erick, this is important stuff and this chart is very helpful. Readers interested in following this issue closely or learning more can also check out http://committe...ctbloggers.org/
I am writing this from jail please help. No I am really writing this from jail I am a Deputy Sheriff and work in a jail. Almost had you huh… Crime is crime and I like to be more realistic, I doubt any of these people were incarcerated because of a blog unless they are from a communist country. Most likely the fact they have a blog is by coincidence. I have a blog am I next. I prefer to stay on the right side of the bars. http://www.FliteRecord.com
@Eric Williams
Did you setup your blog to scam people in donating to your cause? It looks fake.
God I hate people who say “If you dont do anything wrong you can’t be arrested”, on which planet do you live on?
If they’re from a communist country they get what they deserve. I’m alright Jack. Crime is crime, toe the line.
You are an Epsilon.
What makes you think a communist country so terrible??? Where do you base your remark? news papers you’ve read??? I am an ordinary Chinese.
Interesting article, I agree, but not necessarily have these people been arrested for simply blogging. There crimes have to do with actions that very likely go against laws that we are unaware of. Countries don´t all follow the same policies and although some of the “crimes” mentioned may seem unlawful to those of us living in democratic nations, we don´t actually know what exact law was broken that determined their arrest. Freedom of speech is a right that citizens of all democractic countries are privelleged to but this doesn´t necessarily mean that this right is upheld by the same laws everywhere. Journalists, whether bloggers or not, are bound by the laws of their own countries and not by what a particular group of people think these laws should be.
The problem with this is that we do know why people were arrested in many of these cases. Especially in the U.S. and Canada you can see a number of cases where people were arrested for what they said-rather than actions taken. We fear some people so much based on the labels given to them that it doesn’t matter no wrong was committed or how harmless they may be. In the United States the people have a freedom of association right, yet in practice I can be convicted of joining a terrorist organization regardless of if any terrorist actions are taken or planned. The problem is that no democratic country really guarantee freedom of speech. You may have some leeway in issues where the majority are not opinionated or the issue is of little concern. Sadly the population is too easily swayed by fear, uncertainties, and doubt. In other instances people have been locked up for little more than revealing disturbing thoughts, or what a segment of the society in which they live find disturbing.
@admin
Reza Valizadeh is mentioned twice
the numbers probably correlate with #s of journalists
Charles Leblanc (Canada; June, 2006): “For taking pictures at a conference for his blog.”
I just looked it up, he wasn’t specifically arrested for taking pictures. He was arrested because he was within a group of students protestors trying to force their way through.
http://www.cbc....oggertrial.html
So pretty much, he got in the wrong place at the wrong time and was arrested because he was mistaken for a protester. He’ll have his due process and court, and will probably win.
So isn’t this generalization a poor choice of case to add to the list?
In fact, this happened two years ago. The case was thrown out by the judge and she lectured the police over *their* misbehavior. Seems like this was added to pad the count.
This list isn’t a list of that. It is a list of blogger arrests. You don’t need to pad that since it wasn’t a list of injustice explicitly. Many of the cases on the list however do involve injustice-and the blog is about that. Many of these cases involve vulnerable people who could not fight the charges given social and financial standings. Read critically and you wouldn’t miss this little tidbit or consider it padding.
Wow, that is intense… at least blogging about technology is a safe thing… I think?
http://blabtech.blogspot.com
Unless you hack in to NASA and blog about THEIR technology, I’m sure you’ll be fine
It would be nice to see a graph showing the NUMBER of bloggers, because I assume that has risen substantially too.
Duncan Riley (Australia; February, 2008). “For grave abuse of the English language.”
Good post Erick – it is important that the blogging community is very supportive of bloggers who are arrested or threatened.
Reza Valizadeh – does posting this twice makes Iran looks more oppressive? Yes / no ?
Is it a mistake or done deliberately?
Can’t say anything. But keeping in mind the stuff happening these days, it could be a deliberate attempt to focus on “oppressive regime” of Iran, aka “Axis of Evil”
There is also Gopalan Nair, a US citizen who is currently facing charges in Singapore.
http://singapor...t.blogspot.com/
Thanks for pointing out this important issue. Global Voices Advocacy is the place to stay up-to-date on this.
http://advocacy...icesonline.org/
Glad TechCrunch is drawing attention to this.
One if by land. Two if by sea. And three for anyone trying to control http.
This news is saddening. Perhaps it is wise to exercise some tact when blogging.
The web doesn’t have any jurisdiction through any country. How can governments think that it is a reasonable for them to arrest someone doing an activity in a place that is not within their borders?
Well, like another commenter mentioned above, it’s not the act of blogging that’s illegal; it’s the content they post that gets them in trouble.
The thing you skeptics have to do is think, would a person with a press card from a major newspaper be in jail for the same thing? In the case of the Canadian, almost certainly not — by flashing press credentials, they would have been excluded from the round up and arrests.
Arresting citizen journalists should be as odd and rare as citizens’ arrests — and it probably is. But police in the free world need to know as much about citizen journalism as they do about the rights (and wrongs) of how a private citizen can arrest a perp.
Right now, law enforcement is pretty ignorant on most cybercrime and cyberculture topics. I don’t mean that badly — ignorance can be fixed with education, if the person is willing. So if you are law enforcement, don’t just doubt — educate yourself, or find someone who can help get you oriented on these topics!
Is Techcrunch Feed ahead of techcrunch.com ??
Just check http://mynews.m...08c0b9cb0cc1e0f
Check the Techcrunch module you see and article “Facebook Users Get More Control Over Feeds” Which is not on techcrunch.com yet.
Wow amazing finding so I can now know the news coming next on techcrunch from mynews
Eric, never heard about a blogger arrested in France. Although there were some bloggers sued for diffamatory reasons. did you see something i did not?
So i looked at your spreadsheet and Christophe Grebert was not arrested although a trial took place with his own city. but he eventually won
haha @Matt
Wouldn’t it make more sense to plot the ratio of arrested bloggers / total number of bloggers ?
That is…spectacular.
*deletes blog*
why Reza Valizadeh is mentioned twice ?!
Iran bloger in mentioned twice because USA wants to attack Iran right now.
http://secretofall.com/
These decade blog can be used as a weapon
I’m sure if you compared this data to statistics on the number of people who are blogging now compared with 2003 you’ll find that in relative terms the % of bloggers who have been arrested for blogging is going down.
Agree, good point. These are absolute numbers, so what would really be interesting to see a graph taking into account the % of bloggers as you suggested.
What a load of garbage. I bet you could also show the same graph of number of people who owned hybrid vehicles who got arrested since 2003 and see the same trend. Since 2003, there has been a dramatic surge of hybrid vehicle owners being arrested. Would you then write a post titled “Owning a hybrid vehicle is not a crime”?
The information presented here is about as useful as demonstrating that the number of arrests is directly proportional to TechCrunch’s traffic growth.
Have to agree with Crispy. There are more blogger arrests because there are more blogs. Lots and lots and lots more blogs. http://technora...006/11/161.html It’s always sad when someone is arrested for speaking out against authority, and I’ve worked on a campaign to free people like that in Ethiopia (freenega.org), but this post isn’t a good reflection of the state of affairs I’m afraid. If blogs never existed, I’d bet a lot of these political dissidents would also be in jail, because of their message, not the message’s medium.
Best,
Stephen
Stephen, nice that you started that blog. I heard his talk a while back. Are you (or is anyone allowed) in contact with Dr. Nega?
If there are more blogs, does that necessarily mean that there is a proportionately greater number of bloggers doing things that may be illegal where they live? Similarly, there shouldn’t necessarily be more arrests in proportion; in other words, simply because there are (for instance) 1,000,000 more blogs doesn’t mean there has to be 10 more bloggers jailed.
I dont see any conclusion can be drawn without a correlation to the “number of bloggers” graph. I’d think the number of bloggers in the world also increased at about the same rate.
More like “For refusing to turn over videotape evidence of a crime to the investigators.” Of all the people to hold out as an example, Wolf was probably the one person who most deserved to sit in jail.
Your logic is stupid. It’s like saying the government has the right to search all houses in the area to investigate a crime. People should have the right not to hand over any evidence. It’s not like the government is paying him for the evidence. People need to pay for their labor and time. Government always has things for free through the use of force.
I rather have my liberty than to not have any crime at all. Because if you want a society without any crime, read 1984. Stick people in tubes and control their mind.
osshole people who write that the government has the right to force and coerce the right of a free man is dead wrong. Give me liberty or give me death!
If the government attains a series of warrants to conduct those searches, they are presumptively reasonable and well within the rights of the executive branch to execute. Similarly, Josh Wolf was defying a lawful and reasonable grand jury subpoena and Judge Alsup was right to jail him for it.
The argument over whether or not the FBI should have been seeking his video is entirely irrelevant. Subsequent appeals on the matter were rejected. Eventually he coughed up the video and was released, which I somehow doubt was how things played out in these other cases.
As far as I’m concerned he’s the best example on this list of someone who got what he had coming to him. He defied a subpoena; he want to jail. What’s so hard to grasp here? Why are the fundamentals of our legal system so easily brushed away when it is precisely that system which prevent bloggers from going to prison for the wrong reasons, such as political dissent? If anything Josh Wolf belongs on a separate list of a just system actually working in contrast to those that do not.
And for the record, what was printed isn’t even an accurate description of what happened. Wolf didn’t have video of the car being damaged, the FBI was seeking video before and after the incident looking for information that could help them discovery who the arsonist/vandal was. After selling parts of it to a TV station, he refused to provide it to the authorities, and eventually rolled over by publshing the entire thing on his blog.
Just because he was a blogger doesn’t mean he gets to pick and choose which laws he gets to obey and ignore.
I agree with Paul William Tenny. Warrants and subpoenas certainly meet the “due process” condition, and you can be deprived of liberty or property with due process.
Reza Valizadeh (Iran; November, 2007): “For revealing Iranian president’s overpriced dogs that his security team uses.”
Why is this mentioned twice?!?!
oh. sometimes blogging could be dangerous. we must be careful for posting articles in our blog to prevent this kind of problem.
Interesting who they DON’T mention. There’s a pretty high-profile case in Canada right now testing their newish “can’t criticize certain groups” laws concerning Mark Steyn, a conservative media figure and blogger who published a section of his book critical of Muslim extremism in a Canadian magazine. He is being trotted before a thought-police commission with authority, but no accountability, in the named of enforced “tolerance”, which scares this free-speech loving former Canadian. Did he not make the list because he’s not a “pure” blogger, because his “crime” was in print media (although his blog outlines the same ideas), or perhaps because only certain kinds of dissidents get on certain kinds of lists?
Are you from Canada? Whether you are or you’re not, you need to realize that our nation focuses on a tolerant society — “peace, order, and good government” not “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.
In Canada, one’s freedoms (including one’s freedom of expression) do not allow one to trample on the rights of others.
Hate speech is rightfully excluded from free speech in Canada. I can’t see why Americans trust their Constitution when it comes to these matters of common sense.
Yoani Sanchez blogs from Cuba by sneaking her postings on to the web at tourist-only internet cafes. She probably hasn’t been arrested yet because of the international acclaim she’s already gained, including the Spanish equivalent of the Pulitzer price, which she could not receive in person because the Cuban government would not let her travel. Sadly, Cubans in Cuba cannot read her blog, as the grand majority is denied internet access by the government.
Here’s Yoani’s Time 2008 100 profile:
http://www.time...1735878,00.html
I find it very intriguing that the arrests usually came in rapid succession (3-6 months) in the same geographic area.
No Vietnamese on the list ? http://committe...tegory/vietnam/
Freedom of WHAT? ha. I’m from a Caribbean Island (dont want to say which) but people talk about Freedom in the US. Freedom of what? When a man can be arrested for speaking his mind. arrested for using his video cam. Well I travel, and no place is more free than the island.
I’m a Blogger myself and I say. the internet should be open to anything (unless you are killing or scaming, or doing anything that would hurt others)
Unfortunately that’s subjective, especially when some people can be more easily “hurt” than others. Fortunately there are certain processes that can prevent one from physically hurting another just because that one hurt their feelings, but not actually caused “harm”.
Not surprised some said they’ll fight on or some blogger was arrested for blogging. Easy to conclude such without necessarily checking further, but that’s to be expected.
Just a shame, though, that some spread some “news” without verifiable facts, and people take them as some kind of gospel truth. Such deeds aren’t helping anyone.
Human right abuse are everywhere, but bloggers could easily get attention from authorities and sympathizers.
Yea, but it’s not like our government has never tried to conceal anything, then you get a whistle blower and then that person’s retaliated against.
Josh Wolf (USA; August, 2006): “For videotaping a burning police car.”
That is very misleading. He was not arrested for videotaping, he was arrested for refusing to submit the unedited material to the authorities for an arson investigation. He was withholding evidence of a crime and he was, in my opinion, justly arrested.
Wow, pretty scary isnt it. Its where the world is going though.
JT
http://www.FireMe.To/udi
I don’t know where all of the information comes from (both from the original post or from those that reply, but the “probablys and maybes” are sometimes taken as facts.
Of particular interest would be the missing correct information from the original post. As a valued source of news and information, let’s get it right the first time.
http://www.cbc....oggertrial.html
thankfully for twitter, we got at least one back quickly!
Welcome to the ussa!
What a country!
I hope they keep me free.
i will NEVER stop, they can put me in a concentration camp if they want i really dont give a dern.
Eric Schonfeld is a Pedophile