politics of cyberspace

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CounterVortex will be on hiatus through mid-December, as your editor Bill Weinberg will be traveling in Italy, networking with squatters and migrant rights activists. He may post some material from the road. But we will resume regular updates to the Daily Report upon his return. This, of course, is contingent upon Verizon actually making net access available—sporadic outages have considerably slowed our work over the past two weeks. Help CounterVortex win its fight against Verizon, and make them provide the services they are required to supply under New York state law. For further details, listen to our latest podcast. Your continued support is more urgent than ever. Please give what you can to sustain our efforts. No donation is too small. (Hell, five bucks is a cup of coffee in New York City. It's also about 5% of our annual operating costs. Every little bit helps.) (Photo: IBEW)

New York City

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In Episode 22 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg rants in anguish about how he has been deprived of phone and Internet access by Verizon's cynical design to let its copper network deteriorate and impose the transition to cellular, fiber and wireless on consumers against their will. There is no reason to believe this outage will be temporary. The illusions of freedom of choice and communications convenience has left the CounterVortex editor and main ranter with no choice and no ability to communicate—or to produce the journalism he needs to daily produce to make a living. Weinberg contends that his right to work—guaranteed by Article 23 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—is being violated with impunity. Verizon is in violation of international law, as well as New York state law. Weinberg calls upon the New York Public Service Commission to enforce the law on Verizon. He also calls upon the New York Public Utility Law Project to reach out to metro-area consumers similarly left without land-line service, and organize a class-action lawsuit against Verizon. Much more ambitiously, he calls for a public expropriation of Verizon, and the redirection of its technology, infrastructure and capital toward serving the social good rather than private profit. Listen on SoundCloud , and support our podcast via Patreon. (Photo: IBEW)

New York City

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CountertVortex editor and main contributor Bill Weinberg (that would be me) is currently without phone service, and only intermittent Internet access, due to a Verizon equipment failure. The last Verizon chat-jockey I spoke with said "it is major cable issue and will need some time to be solved." That basically means they don't intend to fix it. I use DSL and a land-line—going through the old copper wires that Verizon is trying to phase out. If my service is not restored, I will have no means of producing CounterVortex—or the journalism I must write every day to pay the rent. Many people in New York and around the country are in the same position. We urgently must press Verizon to maintain the old copper-wire infrastructure we depend on—which they are required to do by law. (Photo: IBEW)

Iran

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Amnesty International called for the release of Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, detained since June, and her husband Reza Khandan, who was arrested this week. Reza Khandan was charged with spreading propaganda against the system, colluding to commit crimes against national security, and promoting the practice of appearing in public without a veil. Her actual crime was representing women facing prison time for peacefully protesting against the Islamic Republic's compulsory hijab law. Khandan had raised concerns on Facebook about rights violations in Iran, and publicly campaigned for the release of his wife. Amnesty International director for the Middle East and North Africa, Philip Luther said, "These callous actions illustrate the lengths to which Iranian authorities will go to silence human rights lawyers, even targeting their families." (Photo: Center for Human Rights in Iran)

Greater Middle East

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Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi signed a cybersecurity law that gives the government broad authority to block websites deemed to constitute a threat to national security or the economy, imposing prison terms for anyone found guilty of running or just visiting such sites. Amnesty International described the new law as giving "the state near-total control over print, online and broadcast media." More than 500 websites had already been blocked in Egypt prior to the new law being signed. There is another cybersecurity law before the president, which would places all Twitter accounts with more than 5,000 followers under government supervision. With street protests in Egypt all but banned, the Internet has been one of the last spaces left for dissent. (Photo: Egypt Daily News)

Iraq

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Protests against unemployment, poor government services and corruption that began in Iraq's southern oil hub of Basra have spread to several other cities, including Najaf, Amara, Nasiriya and even Baghdad. At least three have been killed since the protests erupted a week ago. Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi arrived in Barsa to try to calm the situation July 13, flying straight into the city from the NATO summit in Brussels. But the next day he convened a meeting of Iraq's National Security Council, where the decision was taken to cut Internet access in Basra and mobilize army troops to the city. Units from the elite Counter-Terrorism Service and the Army’s Ninth Division have now arrived in Basra. (Photo: Kurdistan24)

Greater Middle East

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The elections that handed a victory to incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdogan were carried out under a state of emergency that has been in place since the attempted coup of 2016, with some 160,000 political opponents imprisoned—including party leaders. The hegemonic state media outlets overwhelmingly devoted their election coverage to Erdogan's campaign, while access to social media was intermittently restricted by decree. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said Erdogan had benefited from this excessive coverage, and raised questions about the transparency of the vote. It did not challenge the results, however. Erdogan will re-enter office with sweeping new powers following a narrowly-won constitutional referendum last year. Opposition leader Muharrem Ince conceded defeat, but warned that Turkey is headed toward "one-man rule." (Map: CIA)

East Asia

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Following the announcement that China's Communist Party has proposed scrapping term limits for the presidency, effectively setting Xi Jinping up as president for life, the online reaction within the People's Republic was initially voluble and irreverent. But authorities quickly cracked down, barring certain words and phrases from Sina Weibo search results. The absurd overkill in what what was blocked betrays an obvious fear of the masses on the part of China's ruling elite. The very titles of George Orwell's novels 1984 and Animal Farm have of course been suppressed. This is hardly surprising. It's almost heartening that despots around the world still find Orwell so dangerous that they have to ban him. But some other samples of the verboten verbiage are more revealing—and enigmatic. (Photo: chinaworker.info)