According to a report from Ma’an News published today, the Palestinian Authority has ordered the blocking of websites belonging to eight news outlets critical of President Mahmoud Abbas. The report states that technicians at PalTel—the largest ISP in the West Bank—tweaked their proxy server and web cache daemon to...

Iran: Authorities Seeking Information on Censorship Tools
The Islamic Republic of Iran has recently become notorious for its efforts to create a “halal” Internet. This week, a security researcher found that Iranian authorities published a “Request for Information” (RFI) seeking details on new types of censorship tools...

At first blush, it seems obvious that a picture could reveal your location. A picture of you standing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge sensibly leads to the conclusion you're in the San Francisco Bay Area when the photo was taken. But now that smartphones are quickly supplanting...

Thai journalist Chiranuch Premchaiporn, better know by her pen name Jiew, is awaiting an April 30th court verdict that could sentence her to years in prison for violating Thailand’s draconian crackdown against free speech. Jiew’s case has focused international attention on Thailand’s lèse majesté laws, which have been used...

Over the past decade, and particularly in the past year, media and civil society have had success through naming and shaming companies acting as “repression’s little helper”: U.S. and E.U. companies who have helped authoritarian countries censor the Internet and surveil their citizens with sophisticated technology. Today, EFF published a...