Syrian blogger disappeared. Hussein Ghrer, a prominent Syrian blogger headquartered in Damascus, disappeared after leaving his house on October 24. Syria has imprisoned, and possibly killed, many journalists, activists and bloggers during the civil strife in Syria.
In case I haven’t made this case lately: These people are you, nerds.
Palestine experiences large-scale hack. The Renesys blog reports “significant but sporadic Internet outages in the Palestinian Territories today. As many as half of the routed networks of the Palestinian Territories were unreachable (withdrawn from the global routing table).” Both the Washington Post and the BBC have reported a possible hack on the Palestinian communications sector.
Egypt throws another blogger in the clink – and the revolution in the toilet. Prominent Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah has been arrested by the Egyptian military. He was summoned for questioning on Sunday. His last tweet says starkly, “Going in.” He has since been remanded for further questioning for 15 days. During his initial appearance he refused to answer questions, declaring the military court that held him, and sentenced fellow blogger Maikel Nabil to three years in prison, was illegitimate.
Kuwait arrests five Twitter users in six months. Kuwait has been arresting Twitterers based on a law – all too common – that makes it a crime to criticize the country’s leaders. On the positive side, Kuwaitis in general and opposition politicians in particular, have been calling bullshit on the arrests at the top of their lungs.
Hacktivist group Anonymous threatens drug cartel. Anonymous has targeted a Mexican drug cartel after that group, Los Zetas, allegedly kidnapped one of its members in Veracruz. In a video released on October 6, the group “claimed that they would release the names of journalists, taxi drivers and others who have worked with Los Zetas in the past” according to Foreign Policy. They also threatened to include the addresses of the collaborators on November 5.
According to the Mexican newspaper Milenio (via Talking Points Memo), some alleged members of Anonymous, including Skill3r and Glyniss Paroubek, are disavowing this operation. Others, including @AnonymouSabu, insist it is still on. We’ll find out tomorrow.
Google hands over Wikileaks volunteer’s info to U.S. government. Google handed over the contacts list and IP address data of Jacob Appelbaum, a WikiLeaks volunteer and developer for Tor, without a warrant. The government requested the information via a secret court order enabled by a controversial 1986 law called the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
