Running head: INTERNET FREEDOM AS A HUMAN RIGHT

Internet Freedom as a Human Right:

Government Censorship Practices in Egypt and China

Derek Lough

University of San Francisco

IME-616/716: Social Movements and Human Rights

Spring 2012

INTERNET FREEDOM AS A HUMAN RIGHT

1

Internet Freedom as a Human Right:

Government Censorship Practices in Egypt, China, and the United States of America

The Internet has changed the way humanity communicates, does commerce, and analyzes

the world since the US National Center for Supercomputing Applications launched the Mosaic

browser program in 1993, making the World-Wide Web available to anyone with a personal

computer (“CERN Press Release,” 1998). As we approach the twentieth anniversary of this

incredible technology’s introduction to the masses, I believe it is necessary to explore another

way the Internet continues to shape our world: giving form to concepts previously unobtainable.

I chose to write on the topic of the Internet as a human right because any attempt to limit its

access should be viewed as social castration and the trampling of a human right. I believe this

due to the connection-forming nature of the Internet; for the first time in human history cross-

cultural relationships are formed at the speed of thought over great distances. The masses are

able to refine the best ideas humanity can offer until collaboration and creativity give birth to

change. It is the natural setting for democracy; a space where all can participate and each voice

has the chance to make an impact. Unfortunately, given the importance of free speech and

expression to the consideration of human rights this right has been, and currently is, being

oppressed.

I will be examining how the Internet and its subset of online tools aided those who sought

democracy in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Prior to abdicating his position, then-President

Mubarak took an unprecedented step in modern history—he shut down the Internet for almost

the entire country (Cowie, 2011). Though this extreme action served the exact opposite function

than the intentions behind it, it was not the only form of Internet censorship occurring in the

world then; nor was that dictatorship the only government practicing online-suppression. In this

INTERNET FREEDOM AS A HUMAN RIGHT

2

paper I will also examine the successes and failures of Internet censorship for the largest nation

on the planet, and how its citizenry feels about the Great Firewall of China. Finally, I will

scrutinize my own country’s attempts to gain control over the Internet through legislation.

Choosing to write on such recent events, some still occurring, does not allow for the acquisition

of many scholarly articles. Hence, my methodology included the use of many news articles,

renowned blog posts expressing educated opinions or first-hand accounts, as well as several of

the academic papers that were available.

As I write this, I am addressing it to my fellow American citizens. In a time when

corporations are considered people, unlimited anonymous donations can be made to political

candidates, and American citizens can now legally be held indefinitely by the military, without

charges or trial—I wish to convey how important you still are. We aren’t consumers of the

United States. We are citizens. Our votes still give us voice and our choices still have an impact.

Where our government has led, the world has followed; but it is up to us to set aside our

individual concerns and put the priorities of the world ahead of our own. The Internet has begun

to, and I believe will continue to shape this planet for the better—as long as we don’t let anyone

take it away from us.

The Internet as a Human Right

As stated above, this author is of the opinion that unobstructed access to the Internet is a

human right in the 21st century. There are some that disagree with that assessment, however. One

such opinion is from Vinton Cerf, an original architect of the Internet and creator of the TCP/IP

protocols that govern individual usage. This “Father of the Internet” believes that “technology is

an enabler of rights, not a right itself. There is a high bar for something to be considered a human

INTERNET FREEDOM AS A HUMAN RIGHT

3

right. Loosely put, it must be things that we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful

lives” (Cerf, 2012). As esteemed a computer engineer and innovator as Cerf is, his idea of a

human right is fundamentally based in the 20th

century. When the United Nations Declaration of

Human Rights (UNDHR) was framed, they looked forward with hope and optimism. Article 27

states: “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy

the arts and to share is scientific advancement and its benefits” (UN Declaration of Human

Rights, 1948). One of the creators, he may be, but at the time Cerf was not in a position to

envision the Internet as a scientific advancement full of benefits that everyone is eligible for.

One other world-renown scholar whose opinion should be considered is the inventor of

the World-Wide Web. Sir Tim Berners-Lee of CERN gives an enlightened view of his creation

and the impact it has had on the human race. He believes that it has become “an empowering

thing for humanity to be connected at high speed and without borders” (Berners-Lee, 2011).

Those at the highest levels of international cooperation have conclusively agreed with Berners-

Lee’s assessment. The Special Rapporteur of the United Nations, Frank La Rue, published his

report “on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression” in the

seventeenth session of the Human Rights Council stating that “the Internet has become a key

means by which individuals can exercise their right to freedom of opinion and expression, as

guaranteed by article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International

Covenant on Civil and Political Rights” (La Rue, 7). What the official goes on to say is worth

noting at length:

Given that the Internet has become an indispensable tool for realizing a range

of human rights, combating inequality, and accelerating development and human

progress, ensuring universal access to the Internet should be a priority for all States.

Each State should thus develop a concrete and effective policy, in consultation with

individuals from all sections of society, including the private sector and relevant

INTERNET FREEDOM AS A HUMAN RIGHT

4

Government ministries, to make the Internet widely available, accessible and

affordable to all segments of population (La Rue, 22).

Though there are many documents that the UN has been unable to put in force for its signatories,

this acknowledgment of the paradigm-shifting importance the Internet has to our multicultural

and global world should reframe the way governments and their citizens view access to the

Internet. Unfortunately, that is not the case for several powerful nations.

The Internet Revolution in Egypt

Movement in the Making.

There were many elements that spurred the Egyptian Revolution, not all of them digital.

Gigi Ibrahim, a political scientist from the University of Cairo who became one of the faces of

the movement for her journalism, blogging, and political activism explained the fundamental

forces that helped shape the nation’s mindset prior to the call to the events of Arab Spring a

process that took decades (Peniche, 2011),. According to her, the 1990s was not a political

climate advantageous to dissenting from the Mubarak regime. If a citizen wanted to complain

about politics she said, “You would go behind the sun” or be very discrete (Ibrahim, 2011). After

the Palestinian Intifada in 2000, Ibrahim described the Egyptian streets being full of people

wanting to stand in solidarity with Palestine, many of whom connected the oppressive Israeli

state and the Mubarak regime as both were allied with the United States. When the US invaded

Iraq in a war of choice in 2003, the sentiment around Egypt was anti-colonial and anti-imperial,

which turned to anti-Mubarak once he supported the invasion (Ibrahim, 2011). Just as in the

United States, there were antiwar demonstrations around the country. Organized by Cairo

University students, the protestors chanted “Down with Mubarak” a year before the first multi-

candidate presidential election. In her lecture in 2011, Ibrahim spoke then of the movement that

INTERNET FREEDOM AS A HUMAN RIGHT

5

millions of Egyptians began to support called “Kefaya,” (2011) after the opposition candidate

had a legal case fabricated against him and ended up being tortured in prison. The movement

translated to English, Ibrahim says means “enough. Enough of Mubarak” (2011). The United

States lost further support from the Egyptian people after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said,

“Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable and is looking for ways to respond to

the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people,” on January 25th

, 2011 (El-Ghobashy,

2011).

Even given the remarkable strength of the authoritarian rule the former president had

over the Egyptian people, it only took eighteen days for his government to fall. The distrust

building in the country transformed into outright objection after the neoliberal economic

ideology began to have an effect on the country’s citizens (El-Ghobashy, 2011). The Internet

might have also begun to play a role, despite there being no causal evidence for this time period.

In 2001, only 600,000 in the population had access to Internet and by 2008, over 6 million could

access the Internet (Lerner, 596). Meanwhile, in January 2001, a small newspaper reported 49

protest events; in 2008 there were hundreds (El-Ghobashy, 2011). Despite the fact that blogging

had been around for some time, digital dissidents began to meet online in the late 2000s, with the

introduction of Facebook in Arabic in March 2009 augmenting this trend (Tufekci, 364). Though

many of these groups met secretly in chat rooms, mosques, and cafes, after the fall of the

Tunisian dictator, the behind-the-scenes work solidified, aiming to break loose all over Egypt.

Facebook came to the aid of the Egyptians by the very structure around which it is

designed. After an Egyptian man was brutally murdered by Egyptian security officials and

photos became available on the Internet, former Google Head of Marketing of Google Middle

East and North Africa, created a Facebook group named after the victim called Kullena Khaled

INTERNET FREEDOM AS A HUMAN RIGHT

6

Said (“We Are All Khaled Said”), and began investing a lot of energy into seeking government

accountability for the death (Ghonim, 2012). The anonymous page was that which originally

called for the protest in Tahrir Square on January 25 (Ghonim, 2012). Though only an Internet

protest, Ghonim was plucked off of the street a few days after the protests started. In Murbarak’s

regime, Internet anonymity could have only protected him temporarily from the other types of

human right abuses at the hands of the government. News of his disappearance made its way

throughout Egypt via social media, face-to-face, as well as telecommunication After he was

released several weeks (and many beatings/inquiries) later, he wouldn’t yet understand how his

integral piece to the puzzle fit in.

Click here to protest.

Prior to Arab Spring, the Egyptian people worried about the failing economy and rising

costs of commodities, but for the most part they went about their daily lives like most states that

have an elite, middle, and working classes (and poverty, of course). The explosion of the Internet

allowed a dissenting space to be created on social media platforms and in the blogosphere. Many

Egyptians before this feared the consequences of speaking their point of view and opinions about

the government person-to-person, and the Internet may have been the only arena where dissent

could be shared (Tufekci, 366). Once Facebook launched in Arabic, political conversation could

be had across a wider social network, with more people reading and participating in the dissent

than ever before; by late 2010 Facebook had four million members in Egypt, many of whom

were dedicated activists with years of training and experience (Tufekci, 366).

INTERNET FREEDOM AS A HUMAN RIGHT

7

Once the physical protests began on January 25, 2011 and Egyptians flocked to occupy

Tahrir Square, they never gave it up. Despite years of practice controlling crowds in that very

location, the riot police were unable to move the protestors from what would become the

“epicenter of Egypt’s revolution” (Shokr, 14). The Mubarak regime has spent much of its thirty-

year rule destroying the social aspects of life in Egypt. Groups of people that could no long

assemble for lack of a public space became reacquainted in the Square. In order to survive the

onslaught of police, the scarcity of resources, and accomplish their shared goals a generous

demeanor took over the people’s mindsets; a departure from the neoliberal zero-sum social

constructs that governed appropriate behaviors gave way to true and spontaneous democracy

where everyone’s best interests were for the people around them (Shokr, 16). Even when the

Mubarak regime tried tactic after tactic to retake the Square, the people’s resolve only

strengthened with each attempt. A look into who was at Tahrir Square could give some insight

into why the group was able to work together and hold out until Mubarak stepped down. Here is

a look at a distribution of protestors in a study done by Tufekci & Wilson:

(2011).

Considering

that the vast majority of

these protestors were educated adults with access to the Internet, via their home computers or

their mobile phones, it only comes as a momentary surprise that the vast majority of the sample

collected first heard about the protests through face-to-face communication. When looking back

INTERNET FREEDOM AS A HUMAN RIGHT

8

at the rather small percentage of the population that had the Internet and that two-thirds of those

present came after the first day, it makes more sense that only 45.4% of the study learned about it

through a form of technology (Tufekci, 370). Those statistics are even more illuminating due to

the fact that the Mubarak regime had ordered a shutdown of all four major Internet service

providers servicing Egypt two days after the protests began.

Disconnected.

On January 27, 2011 then-President Mubarak ordered the global isolation of Egypt by

way of shutting down international Internet routing, effectively cutting off communication

between and out of the country. Thought some worried that the transnational fiberoptic cables

had been cut, an real-time Internet

Data Company whose aim is

transparency and intelligence

analysis, began to break down the

most-likely path to this Internet

blackout. Beginning with Telecom

Egypt at 22:12:43, the four major

hubs to the Internet began to take

themselves offline. Raya followed a

minute later, with Etisalat Misr and Internet Egypt continuing suit within 13 minutes of the first

provider. The graph above of “Globally Reachable Egyptian Networks” shows that all Internet

activity is down within twenty minutes (Cowie, 2011). This event was the first time in the

history of the Internet where all access has been denied to an entire population. Unfortunately,

this strike against the freedom of speech and expression did not end there. Reports followed that

INTERNET FREEDOM AS A HUMAN RIGHT

9

both Blackberry and phone text messaging also went down around this time. In keeping with the

neoliberal ideology he adopted after getting support from the United States, the regime kept one

node active: Noor Group controls the Egyptian Stock Exchange. Mubarak was trampling on the

rights of millions while ensuring the viability of his (and the elite’s) billions. Though he probably

was attempting to squash the online rebellion on Facebook saw over 90,000 members

announcing their intentions to attend a day of protest (يد ع س د نا خال ل the former (2011 ,ك

president did not think about what would happen when people could no longer communicate

from the comfort of their own homes.

Reconnecting.

I have woken up in the morning without my Internet working. I’m sure that is something

many of us privileged enough to enjoy that right have had to endure. I can only imagine the

confusion and anger that Egyptians felt as they realized that not only did they not have the

service, but that their families lost it as well. As they tried to connect with their phones, again

their attempts were rebuffed. So they called friends, extended family, and coworkers. No one

could connect to the outside work unless it was a simple phone call. That was enough for some

creative allies of the Egyptians. Within a few hours of the Internet Black Hole descending upon

Egypt, John Scott-Railton collaborated with several colleagues to build an effective bypass to the

digital blockade: @jan25voices otherwise known as The Voices Feeds (Scott-Railton, 2011).

This project allowed people in Egypt to call him using a landline after which he transcribed their

messages onto Twitter. Spawning from that @speak2tweak came to life where people could call

an automated voicemail and have their narratives posted online. However, due to the nature of

the phone calls being from the Middle East and Northern Africa, most of the calls were in Arabic

so a creative media company by the name of Small World News created a site called Alive.in

INTERNET FREEDOM AS A HUMAN RIGHT

10

Egypt that translated voice messages and fostered a citizen-media project (Vila, 2011). The

Internet can indeed create collaborative and innovative relationships.

The other option the Egyptian people had been to walk out of the front door and head to

the streets in order to find out what was going on. This was precisely the result that Mubarak was

looking to avoid. His attack on what will, in time, be widely considered a human right was the

catalyst that drove hundreds of thousands of people to the streets, following their neighbors to

Tahrir Square where they greeted each other like relatives they hadn’t been in contact with in

years. And once there, many did not leave—not for eighteen long days—until President Mubarak

finally seceded his office. The dictator was still ousted, even though he had restored the Internet

to Egypt…nearly two weeks earlier. Those who were not already in the throng ventured down to

celebrate with the masses.

What lessons were learned from Tahrir Square? While there are probably too many to list

here, an excellent and typical example can be found in one woman’s blog post about the night of

the celebrations. As she was leaving the Square to sleep, she heard about a cleanup for the area

to be performed the next morning. She woke early to go help and most of it was already finished.

Yet the thousands of people remained to clean side street after side street, continuing to work in

teams of both random chance and newly formed friendships. Some fed, some watered, some

cleaned and other disposed of trash (Ibrahim, 2011). The Egyptian people were together; a little

thing like victory was not going to derail what was their true triumph: unity and integrity in the

face of human rights abuses.

INTERNET FREEDOM AS A HUMAN RIGHT

11

The Great Firewall of China

Cogs in the Wheel of Censorship.

The People’s Republic of China has a long history of violating its citizens’ human rights.

It is easy to overlook the people in China, when so much of the focus is on the Communist Party

and their agenda, especially in light of the recent economic success fed by American

consumerism. However, considering the resources that the Chinese government invests in

keeping its 1.3 billion wards in a void of silence and misinformation, it is impossible to ignore

the tens of thousands of men and women earning their wages by suppressing the freedom of

expression of their kinsmen. No automatic service can yet regulate the real-time efforts of over

500 million Internet-users to obtain prohibited information, publish dissenting opinions, or

critique the Communist Party (Moskvitch, 2012). In order to accomplish this task, a multifaceted

approach is used.

The first tactic used is just prohibiting certain companies from doing business in China,

essentially banning their content completely from the country. Several high-profit, high profile

Internet services have a permanent ban on them, including YouTube, Twitter, Dropbox,

Facebook, and Foursquare (Moskvitch, 2012). In a global news event two years ago, Google

threatened to close its operations in China after refusing to filter its search results to the Chinese

population. Citing cyber-attacks on its email service as an attempt to route out human rights

advocates, it closed its operations for four months before acquiescing to the Chinese government

in order to stay in the largest market in the world (Internet Censorship in China, 2010).

Nevertheless, China has still prohibited Google+ and the new Google Drive (Moskvitch, 2012).

INTERNET FREEDOM AS A HUMAN RIGHT

12

Aside from blacklisting some of the most popular web-services and humanity-connecting

tools on the planet, the Ruling Party also forces domestic Internet companies and websites to

“employ people who monitor and delete objectionable content; tens of thousands of others are

paid to ‘guide’ bulletin board Web exchanges in the government’s favor” (Internet Censorship in

China, 2010). One of the perks of disallowing these sites into the market is that the government

clones them, and releases its own government-friendly versions of the originals. Youku, the

Chinese version of YouTube is

preforming well while the

Communist-owned Sina Weibo

has twice as many users as its

Western counterpart, Twitter

(Moskvitch, 2012). To the right

is a graphic showing Chinese

clones of big web-businesses

(Techspectations, 2010).

Strict keyword censorship in its purest form of the word is the third tactic the People’s

Republic of China uses to strip the human rights of its citizens. Never mind discussions with

web-services or controlling the content from top-down, if there is something that the Communist

Party just doesn’t want someone to say online, they will stop them; by any means. Several

examples exist from recent memory. The first example I would like to discuss was the

preemptive censoring that occurred leading up to the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen

Square Protest in 1989. Despite the fact that this tragedy is widely known as one of the worst

human rights violations in modern history, there is a severe vacuum of information about it

INTERNET FREEDOM AS A HUMAN RIGHT

13

available to the Chinese public. The government maintains that it was a necessary used of force

and forbids any discussion about the event that doesn’t coincide with the state-sponsored story.

As the months led up to the anniversary in 2009, China shut down several popular

communications services on the Internet, including Hotmail, Flickr, and MSN spaces while

physically securing the Square from entry on that day; the next year they banned anyone from

the symbolic protest of “checking in” on the application Foursquare (Casting a Wider Net, 32).

The second example is of a tragedy that occurred in the Zhejiang District, when the much-

boasted about government’s high-speed train had a wreck involving a second train that collided

with it, killing 40 people and injuring 191. Several microblogging posts on Sina Weibo had been

sent just prior to the collision talking about the train’s strange behavior; 26 million posts were

made after news of the collision went viral (Wines, 2011). Several blog posts recounting the

horrors on the train were posted 100,000 times. This became a problem for the Chinese

government as the original story it told the public was one of bad weather. The censorship

machine was unable to catch all of the angry and distrustful posts that occurred after the truth

came out in enough time to save face from a citizenry that was growing tired of the lies and in

need of some transparency, as well as some freedom of self-expression.

A Billion Thinking Grains of Sand.

An internationally renown literary critic, poet, and one of the most ardent human rights

activists still living won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010—and a billion of his fellow Chinese

might not have heard about it yet. So severe are the censorships in the Great Firewall of China,

that few were able to learn about it before the government cut live feeds from CNN and BBC

showing the newest Laureates. Liu Xiaobo, a chronic-criminal in the eyes of the Communist

Party (a tragic example of the authoritarian rule in the People’s Republic to the rest of the world),

INTERNET FREEDOM AS A HUMAN RIGHT

14

might not even know that he won it himself as he is serving the third year in an eleven –year

prison sentence for continually, and publically, dissenting from the Communist Party line.

Xaiobo helped lead the Tiananmen Square Protests, and most recently co-authored a pro-

democracy manifesto “that managed to gather 303 signatures before the authorities intervened,

then thousands more online” (Beech, 2010). It is with a human right perspective that democracy

breeds tolerance and creativity. Though there are other examples of Chinese citizens willing to

defy the Party, many end up like activist lawyer Gao Zhisheng—disappeared for more than year.

Some aren’t lucky enough to be returned (Ramzy, 2010). Younger Chinese now have a

figurehead, to which they can look upon whose willingness to put himself at risk for their benefit

can help them imagine an open China, one that respects the human rights of its people, and

perhaps one without the Communist Party (Beech, 2010).

Concluding Thoughts: The United States of America

As I conclude this research paper, I would like to reflect on the words of Secretary of

State Hillary Clinton as she gave a speech at the Conference on Internet Freedom hosted by The

Hague in December 2011. She said,

The first challenge is for the private sector to embrace its role in protecting

Internet freedom, because whether you like it or not, the choices that private

companies make have an impact on how information flows or doesn’t flow on the

Internet and mobile networks. They also have an impact on what governments can and

can’t do, and they have an impact on people on the ground (Clinton, 2011).

Though it sounds as if she is taking a stand against those corporations that choose profits over

the role of protector, we as Americans must remember that the neoliberal ideology which

INTERNET FREEDOM AS A HUMAN RIGHT

15

governs our economy, and sometimes our politics, is what drives the private sector to act against

our best interests, most recently against our Internet freedoms. When the United Nations

declared that access to the Internet was a human right, it specifically states that it is up to the

governments to manufacture a way to give access to all of its citizens, uncorrupted and

uncontested. And it is our job, as those citizens to ensure that they do it. If we leave such an

important task to the private sector, we end up with legislation like the Stop Online Privacy Act,

which was recently discredited as being modeled after the very Chinese censorship previously

discussed in this paper.

We as human beings, and as those privileged enough to live in the wealthiest county on

the planet, must work harder than those corporations who wish to profit off of our data to ensure

our Internet freedom; we must think more creatively than the United States government, which

imposes fear-mongering legislation on us such as the Cyber Intelligence Security and Protection

Act (which just passed in the House of Representatives), for the sake of security regardless of

how broad and open-ended it may be. We have, as a human right, the ability to express ourselves

without fear of reprisal. We have, as United States citizens, a duty to protect our democracy from

unwarranted attacks on its people—all for the sake of power and wealth. Even as we continue to

fight for our personal liberty, we must remember those in Egypt who fought for communal

liberty. As we look onto China, it is important to remember that bearing witness is central to the

promotion of human rights. We must not shy away from asking the tough questions, listening to

the tragic responses, and putting a concentrated effort into understanding our role in the larger,

complex world.

“Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an

authoritarian regime.” -Potter Stewart, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court

INTERNET FREEDOM AS A HUMAN RIGHT

16

References

Beech, H., & Ramzy, A. (2010, October 25). China’s Eyes on the Prize. Time, Vol. 176, Issue 17,

40-43.

Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and Citizen Lab at Munk School of Global Affairs.

(2011, October 11). Casting a Wider Net: Lessons learned in delivering BBC content on

the censored Internet. University of Toronto. Retrieved from

http://munkschool.utoronto.ca/downloads/casting.pdf

Cerf, V. (2012, January 4). Internet Access Is Not a Human Right. The New York Times.

Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/opinion/Internet-access-is-not-a-

human-right.html.

Clinton, Hillary. (2011, December 8). Remarks by the Secretary of State. Conference on Internet

Freedom. Retrieved from http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2011/12/178511.htm.

Cowie, J. (2011, January 27). Egypt leaves the Internet. Renesys Blog. Retrieved from

http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/01/egypt-leaves-the-Internet.shtml.

El-Ghobashy, M. (2011, March 1). The Praxis of the Egyptian Revolution. Middle East Report

. 258. Retrieved from http://www.merip.org/mer/mer258/praxis-egyptian-revolution.

Ghonim, W. (2012, February 9). Interview by T. Gross: [Audio Tape Recording]. Creating a

revolution 2.0 in egypt. Fresh Air, Retrieved from

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/09/146636605/wael-ghonim-creating-a-revolution-2-0-in-

INTERNET FREEDOM AS A HUMAN RIGHT

17

Ibrahim, G. (2011, Nov). Gigi Ibrahim on the Egyptian Revolution. Challenging (Un)certainties -

the Future of Education and Sustainability CEMUS conference. Retrieved from

http://www.cemus.uu.se/openuniversity/index.php/en/egyptian-revolution-gigi-ibrahim

Ibrahim, M. (2011). “A Revolution That Inspired A Nation To Camaraderie.” Retrieved from

http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/revolution-inspired-nation.htm

“Internet Censorship in China.” (2010, March 22). The New York Times.

La Rue, F. (2011, May 11). “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection

of the right to freedom of opinion and expression.” Retrieved from

http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/125193/united-nations-report-Internet-access-is-

a-human.pdf.

Lerner, M. Y. (2010). Connecting the Actual with the Virtual: The Internet and Social Movement

Theory in the Muslim World-The Cases of Iran and Egypt. Journal Of Muslim Minority

Affairs, 30(4), 555-574. doi:10.1080/13602004.2010.533453United Nations (1948,

December 10). United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Retrieved from

www.un.org/rights/50/decla.htm.

Moskvitch, K. (2012, May 2). Cracks in the wall: Will China’s Great Firewall backfire? British

Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-

17910953

Ramzy, A. (2010, April 13). The Great Firewall: China’s Web Users Battle Censorship. Time.

Retrieved from http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1981566,00.html.

INTERNET FREEDOM AS A HUMAN RIGHT

18

Scott-Railton, J. (2011, January 27). The Voices Feeds. Retrieved May 3, 2012, from

http://johnscottrailton.com/the-voices-feeds/.

Shokr, A. (2011, March 1). The 18 Days of Tahrir. Middle East Report, 258, 14-19.

“Techspectations Shanghai Seminars” (2010, December). Techspectations: helping everyone

participate in the information society. Retrieved from

http://techspectations.org/blog/techspectations-shanghai-seminars-december-2010/.

Tim Berner-Lee: ‘Access to Internet is a human right.’ (2011, April 19). British Broadcasting

Corporation. Retrieved from www.bcc.com/news/technology-13124335.

Tufekci, Z., & Wilson, C. (2012). Social Media and Political Protest in Egypt: Observations from

Tahrir Square. Journal of Communication, 62, 363-379.

Vila, S. (2011). Keeping Egyptians connected without the Internet. Access to Information, Build

Awareness, Collaborate, Middle East & North Africa. Retrieved from

http://www.movements.org/case-study/entry/keeping-egyptians-connected-without-

Internet/.

Wines, M., & LaFraniere, S. (2011, July 28). In Baring Facts of Train Crash, Blogs Erode China

Censorship. The New York Times. Retrieved from

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/29/world/asia/29china.html?_r=1&ref=Internetcensors

hip.

WWWelcome to CERN!. (1998). Retrieved May 3, 2012, from

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/pressreleases/Releases1998/PR07.98EWWWelcome.html.

INTERNET FREEDOM AS A HUMAN RIGHT

19

يد ع س د نا خال ل ساد ] In Facebook .(January 25 ,2011) .ك ف لى ال ثورة ع ل ضب ل غ عة ال جم

لم ظ ة وال بطال ب[. morf 2102 ,4 yaM deveirteR وال عذي ت وال

https://www.facebook.com/events/141531305908212/.