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Abby Zimet
RINF Alternative News
For the first time, Reporters Without Borders have added the U.S. and U.K to their annual press freedom index of countries – including longtime favorites like Iran, Cuba, North Korea and Saudi Arabia – that repress online speech and use the internet to conduct domestic surveillance. They specifically call out the hypocrisy of abuses by government agencies within supposed democracies – cue the NSA – that have “hacked into the very heart of the Internet…(and) turned it into a weapon in the service of special interests.” With interactive, scary graphics.
“The mass surveillance methods employed in these countries…are all the more intolerable because they will be used and indeed are already being used by authoritarians countries such as Iran, China, Turkmenistan, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain to justify their own violations of freedom of information. How will so-called democratic countries will able to press for the protection of journalists if they adopt the very practices they are criticizing authoritarian regimes for?”
Abby Zimet writes for Common Dreams.
Reprinted with permission.