Iranian Bloggers Jailed

Hat tip to Brian at Grafyte for the link to this story: bq. When blogging can get you locked up Javad Gholam Tamayomi, Omid Memarian, Shahram Rafihzadeh, Hanif Mazroi, Rozbeh Mir Ebrahimi, Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh and Fereshteh Ghazi are some of the most courageous people you've never met. Not exactly household names, but each deserves a standing ovation. bq. During a crackdown against Iran's nascent online press last year, these sundry online journalists and bloggers got chucked into jail. The cyber seven were subsequently released but continue to invite the periodic and not-so-tender attention of the local police. bq. A blogger named Mojtaba Saminejad, also arrested on trumped-up charges at the beginning of November after condemning the jailings in his blog, is still being held in prison. bq. Increasingly, it seems, blogging can get you in big trouble. And as the number of Web logs and Internet news sites grows, journalists and bloggers regularly find themselves at odds with governments that are unenthusiastic about freedom of expression. The author then talks about the filtering, monitoring and censorship that is going on in Iran and China and suggests the following: bq. Get a backbone Internet infrastructure providers can't plead willful ignorance anymore. In China, for example, Cisco Systems routers do the heavy lifting for the country's surveillance infrastructure. Internet traffic passes through only five hubs, making it oh so easy to snoop on Web surfers and read private e-mails. bq. I'm not suggesting that Cisco was complicit in setting up a spy system, but the company's engineers did help program the equipment. Wouldn't it have been something if CEO John Chambers had shown more interest in how his company's technology was going to be used? Who knows--maybe Cisco could have extracted even a small concession from the authorities in Beijing. The business world doesn't produce heroes, but we should expect its leaders to occasionally demonstrate guts. Emphasis mine -- excellent thought... The entire article is worth checking out.