News Analysis Robert Clark 1/14/2021
Hong Kong telcos have reached a milestone for the first time they are blocking a website on security grounds.
The order to limit access to a local website that documents police abuses was made under the contentious National Security Law (NSL), introduced on July 1.
HKBN, the biggest home broadband provider, today became the first to confirm it had blocked access to the HK Chronicles website at police instruction.
Police will not confirm whether they have invoked the security law against the website or give reasons why.
The blocking of HK Chronicles became known last week when editor Naomi Chan advised last week that it had become inaccessible to many visitors.
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Turkey is advocating the services of local messaging apps in the wake of Facebook plans to integrate the social network’s messaging services, a step critics say will weaken users’ protection against digital snooping and further tighten the police state grip on freedoms.
Last week WhatsApp, which was bought by Facebook in 2014, set out new terms asking users to agree for location and other personal data to be passed to its parent company, prompting many Turkish users to delete their WhatsApp accounts.
Spurring the exodus from WhatsApp, the head of the government’s digital office, Ali Taha Koc, called on Turks to “stand against fascism together”, a reference to a November speech by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in which he called for a stance against “digital fascism”.
The centre-right government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis has been increasingly using “tyrannical” methods such as controlling the media to keep the opposition voices in check, Greece’s former foreign minister Nikos Kotzias told EURACTIV, warning also about the closed power system of oligarchs that blocks any progress in the country.
“The Mitsotakis government uses tyrannical methods as Aristotle described: it is not a dictatorship, but methods and precautionary measures taken by a majority, such as controlling the press or using the pandemic to take repressive measures, to prevent the minority from becoming a majority,” said the former diplomacy chief in the leftist cabinet of Alexis Tsipras.
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