One Third Of Jailed Journalists Are Bloggers

A new report by the Committee to Protect Journalists warns of increasing authoritarian attitudes towards the free flow of information on the Internet as statistics reveal that of the estimated 134 journalists jailed for their work worldwide, a full third are Internet writers and bloggers.

 
Reuters reports,

 
"We're at a crucial juncture in the fight for press freedom because authoritarian states have made the Internet a major front in their effort to control information," Committee Executive Director Joel Simon said in a statement.

 
"China is challenging the notion that the Internet is impossible to control or censor, and if it succeeds there will be far-ranging implications, not only for the medium but for press freedom all over the world."

 
The past few months have produced a noted increase in the amount of negative rhetoric spewed forth by western governments over the so-called dangers of the Internet and its exploitation by "terrorist organizations."

 
What we are witnessing is clearly a chilling effect and an attempt to stifle people from feeling comfortable in openly expressing their feelings about the phantom "war on terror" and other political catastrophes via the forum of the world wide web.

 
As the implementation of biometric technology and its application to security becomes more widely used, we are not far from the day when we have have to thumb scan simply to use the Internet and only with government permission will we be allowed to run a blog.

 
It's already happening in China, where the government is about to force Internet users who wish to start a to a blog to register using their real name and ID card number. State licensing of blogging, combined with legislation that paves the way for the introduction of ID cards both in the US and the UK, are the cocktail for a cyber police state, where only those who express political opinions sympathetic to government policies will be allowed to keep their blog.

 
Add to this the state-imposed mental illness of political correctness brainwashing, whereby criticism of any individual, policy, group, gender, race or sexuality is treated as hate crime, and the last outpost of true freedom of speech will exist no more - replaced by a stifled, poisoned, controlled, censored, regulated "Internet 2."