Ibrahim Essa, the outspoken editor of Egypt’s independent opposition Al Dustour newspaper has won the 2008 Tueni award from the Paris-based World Association of Newspapers (WAN). He used his December 13 acceptance remarks in Beirut, Lebanon, to call on Arab journalists to fight restrictions in the region directed against independent media voices.

“All those whom you see scrambling, competing, calling one another’s names, quarrelling and disputing at summit meetings never come out with any agreement, except on the bottom line of fighting press freedom,” Essa said. “This is the only war Arab rulers have ever agreed upon.”

The Tueni award is given in memory of Lebanese publisher Gebran Tueni who was killed by a car bomb in Beirut on December 12, 2005. Tueni’s family created the award with WAN to encourage other courageous and independent publishers, editors and newspapers in the Arab world.

Essa, who has been sentenced to prison terms and seen his newspaper temporarily shut down due to the Egyptian government’s objections to its material, was praised by WAN for crossing “many red lines” in the cause of press freedom and paying “a high price for doing so.”

In a separate statement, WAN said the hostility of Arab regimes to press freedom and critical voices is “alarming” and those daring to express dissent or investigate and challenge their governments “face charges of criminal defamation, blasphemy or endangering national security, and are regularly sentenced to hefty fines and imprisonment.”

On the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, President Bush met with eight bloggers and new media users from China, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Egypt and Belarus.

The White House said Bush planned to discuss “the challenges they confront in overcoming censorship.”

Six of the individuals met with Bush at the White House; participants from Egypt and Venezuela joined by teleconference.

The White House also highlighted the efforts of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) to aid citizen journalists. BBG oversees international radio broadcasters such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Radio Farda, as well as television networks like Alhurra and TV Marti.

BBG news outlets are getting reports out of heavily censored countries by getting citizen journalists to submit information from cell phones, SMS feeds and e-mails, and encouraging participation in its radio, television and blog discussions.

Partnering with nongovernmental organizations, BBG also has developed free anti-censorship software and technical tools that are available in English, Persian, Kazakh, Mandarin and Vietnamese. A BBG spokesperson said users can go to one of those language sites and sign up to get updates, which include information “alerting people to work arounds” for the ongoing battle with the state censors.

In a recent interview with an Iranian journalist and blogger who now lives in Canada, I asked how Iranian bloggers protect themselves from government authorities that are increasing restrictions, intensifying scrutiny, and raising the cost of getting caught.   (See “Heretic” Bloggers Risk Execution Under Iran’s New Restrictions.)

He said many bloggers use “anonymizers” to hide their Internet protocol (IP) addresses, but lamented that there was no online manual to instruct new bloggers on how to change their IP address, get around filtering, and create closed blog communities.

I’m sure he will share my delight in discovering that Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has put together a Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents that covers everything from getting started to blog ethics to defensive strategies. It’s available in English, Persian, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and French.

“Bloggers cause anxiety,” it reads. “Governments are wary of these men and women, who post news without officially being journalists. Worse, they frequently raise sensitive issues which the media, now known as ‘traditional,’ dare not cover.”

The handbook advises those who wish to blog anonymously to set up their accounts under pseudonyms from a public-access computer. It gives instructions on the use of proxy servers such as Tor and advice on how to cover your tracks.

If you live in a country that censors parts of the Internet, RSF also has a section on circumvention systems and how to “tunnel” to a computer in a unfiltered location. All this information is accompanied by plenty of warning that users might soon find themselves dealing with very unhappy government authorities.

For a laugh (or a cry), check out the 2008 “Golden Scissors” awards at the very end for the most effective authoritarian regime actions against the online activities of their citizens.

Author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who passed away August 3, revealed the abuses of Soviet Gulag prison camps in the 1970s. For many, his death brought back memories of secretly copying clandestine writings and passing them hand to hand under the noses of the Soviet authorities.

Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, whose 2003 book Gulag: A History won a Pulitzer Prize, recalled how the first copies of Solzhenitsyn’s 1974 The Gulag Archipelago his Russian audience saw were unbound and hand-typed — “blurry, mimeographed text” with “dog-eared paper.”

“Usually, readers were given only 24 hours to finish the lengthy manuscript … before it had to be passed on to the next person. That meant spending an entire day and night,” she wrote. Readers also were encouraged to type or write another copy if they could.

Clandestine books and writings by Russian authors were known as “samizdat,” meaning “self-published,” as opposed to “tamizdat” which was forbidden literature smuggled in from overseas. Along with Solzhenitsyn, some of today’s Russian classics such as Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak and The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov began their public life as samizdat.

Famous scientist and political dissident Alexander Bolonkin tried to publish samizdat on a large scale in the 1970s before his arrest, imprisonment and eventual exile to the United States. Knowing the KGB monitored printing houses, he first experimented with photo printing, and then discovered a crude form of mimeography.

“The text was typed on the fibrous paper sodden with paraffin with the help of typewriter. The obtained matrix was put on the bland print and was pressed by the roller with paint. There appeared a copy below. All the process took few seconds. The components were sold at stores. Anybody could make or buy a photoroller. Indeed the quality of the imprints was quite low,” he wrote in his memoirs.

After the collapse of Soviet Union in the late 1980s, once-forbidden literature, much of which had been smuggled abroad, became widely available. But, thanks to samizdat, writers like Solzhenitsyn did not have to wait for a new era but instead had the chance to hasten its arrival.

August 8, 2008, marks 20 years since Burmese students began a pro-democracy uprising against the military regime led by General U Ne Win. The “8888 uprising” ultimately was crushed and military rule re-imposed at the cost of about 3,000 civilian lives.

But the yearning for a free press made the summer of 1988 one of the country’s richest in journalistic and literary activity.

Between August 25 and 27, the staffs of Burma’s official newspapers joined in calls for the government’s resignation, formation of an interim government and multiparty elections. State journalists also demanded the right to report accurately on the demonstrations.

For three days, no newspapers appeared; on the fourth day, readers saw photos of peaceful marches and articles that recounted their demands.

Even more remarkable were the nearly 100 unofficial publications that sprang up between August 27 and September 21. Along with reports and photos of the demonstrations, they carried long interviews with opposition leaders, including Aung San Suu Kyi and articles from the Western press on how to conduct democratic elections. They also provided a platform for personal statements and editorials by leading journalists who had been blacklisted or driven into silence.

In her 1993 report Inked Over, Ripped Out, Professor Anna Allott described the period as “the Burmese version of glasnost,” and wrote “Journalistic activity continued to increase in intensity and effectiveness, almost as if the free, unofficial publications were spurring the official press to give more accurate information.”

The military forcefully re-imposed its rule with a September 16 massacre of civilians and a September 18 coup. The official newspapers disappeared September 19 and 20, and resurfaced in their old forms – with little real news or objective comment. The unofficial newspapers all but disappeared and the state censorship bureau became even more restrictive than it had been before 1988.

Want to find out more? Read Professor Allot’s report and my recent article about how Burmese writers have been coping with the state censors.

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The international news media discovered to their consternation July 29 that Chinese censorship of the Internet will not be taking an Olympic holiday. So any online research you’d like to do on sensitive topics like Tibet, Tiananman Square or the Falun Gong had best be done before getting on the plane to Beijing.

But there is hope. U.S.-based Network World has some ideas to help you protect your access to information and hang on to information you’ve collected.

Hints in the article, Top Ten Ways to protect your Data at the Beijing Olympics, range from the obvious – “Keep your laptops, PDAs and cell phones within sight at all times” – to encryption advice and links to anonymizer sites designed to hide your Internet activity.

China’s Internet restrictions seem at odds with its pledge to allow free reporting during the Games. At the White House, press secretary Dana Perino said that Chinese Internet access has grown, but “China would be enhanced and continue to prosper if it allowed for more freedoms.”

President Bush will be attending the opening ceremonies in Beijing, but Perino said he also plans to talk to Chinese leaders about human rights, democracy and Internet freedom.

Do you have hints you’d like to share, or stories of bad experiences you can help others avoid? Please express them!

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