In his closing message, he said: “State-sponsored attacks are not in the interests of any country, long term… those governments that perpetrate them need to bring them under control.” He did not name names.

Some private-sector delegates like Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales were less reticent.

“People do realize that there are some legitimate problems and that those problems need solutions,” he told Reuters in an interview. “The difficulty comes when you’ve got countries like China who maybe view freedom of speech as the problem that needs to be solved.”

Canadian academic Rafal Rohozinski, an expert on cyber warfare and chief executive of the SecDev Group, said the West was under pressure to regain control of the agenda on Internet governance in the face of a growing bloc of developing nations that want more influence.

“The G8, the Euro-Atlantic alliance if you like, needs to come up with an effective counter-narrative,” he told Reuters.

More controversially, Mr. Cameron said the government was working on measures that would stop rioters from using social media — Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry Messenger, principally — to coordinate and direct their “horrific actions.” Borrowing a leaf from authoritarian governments that Britain has been quick to criticize in the past for similar measures — China, Egypt and Libya, among others — he said his government had concluded that “it would be right to stop people communicating via these Web sites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.”

Free-speech groups said restrictions on the use of social media or smartphones would be difficult to enforce and could violate basic freedoms.

“It seems like a bizarre and kind of knee-jerk reaction by the government,” said Padraig Reidy, news editor of Index on Censorship, a magazine that covers free-speech issues. “We’ve seen this kind of thing time and time again, especially with young people, when it comes to technology. Now it’s social networks and smartphones. A few years ago it was video games. Before that it was horror films.”

More from NYT.

Developers caution that independent networks come with downsides: repressive governments could use surveillance to pinpoint and arrest activists who use the technology or simply catch them bringing hardware across the border. But others believe that the risks are outweighed by the potential impact. “We’re going to build a separate infrastructure where the technology is nearly impossible to shut down, to control, to surveil,” said Sascha Meinrath, who is leading the “Internet in a suitcase” project as director of the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group.

“First they shut down our Internet, then they interrupted our cellphone service and finally they imprisoned us at school,” said the student, an intense, foppishly dressed literature major who was not on campus when the lockdown took effect last Saturday. “The students are afraid, but more than that, they are angry.”

It appears that the shut downs are being done using special equipment, not at the network level:

Despite the official state of emergency, classes have been taking place as usual, although Internet access has been cut and wireless signal-blocking devices — four-stories tall and clearly visible from the street — have been playing havoc with cellphone reception.

Full story.

The Syrian government is cracking down on protesters’ use of social media and the Internet to promote their rebellion just three months after allowing citizens to have open access to Facebook and YouTube, according to Syrian activists and digital privacy experts.

Security officials are moving on multiple fronts — demanding dissidents turn over their Facebook passwords and switching off the 3G mobile network at times, sharply limiting the ability of dissidents to upload videos of protests to YouTube, according to several activists in Syria. And supporters of President Bashar al-Assad, calling themselves the Syrian Electronic Army, are using the same tools to try to discredit dissidents.

In contrast to the Mubarak government in Egypt, which tried to quash dissent by shutting down the country’s entire Internet, the Syrian government is taking a more strategic approach, turning off electricity and telephone service in neighborhoods with the most unrest, activists say.

Full story.

As the events unfolded Friday, user names flashed and faded. Twitter flickered with agitprop and trash talk. And Facebook glided past Gmail and Skype as Mr. Nakhle joined a coterie of exiled Syrians fomenting, reporting and, most remarkably, shaping the greatest challenge to four decades of the Assad family’s rule in Syria.

“Can you hear it?” Mr. Nakhle cried, showing a video of chants for the government’s fall. “This is Syria, man! Unbelievable.”

Unlike the revolts in Egypt, Tunisia and even Libya, which were televised to the world, Syria’s revolt is distinguished by the power of a self-styled vanguard abroad to ferry out images and news that are anarchic and illuminating, if incomplete.

For weeks now, the small number of activists, spanning the Middle East, Europe and the United States, have coordinated across almost every time zone and managed to smuggle hundreds of satellite and mobile phones, modems, laptops and cameras into Syria. There, compatriots elude surveillance with e-mailed software and upload videos on dial-up connections.

Their work has ensured what was once impossible.

In 1982, Syria’s government managed to hide, for a time, its massacre of at least 10,000 people in Hama in a brutal crackdown of an Islamist revolt. But Saturday, the world could witness, in almost real time, the chants of anger and cries for the fallen as security forces fired on the funerals for Friday’s dead.

An AFP report from the West African nation of Cameroon says that:

Cameroon’s government has asked a cell phone service provider to suspend its mobile Twitter service for “security reasons,” an activist at a media watchdog said Tuesday.

MTN Cameroon, one of the country’s three cell service providers, shut down access to the micro-blogging site after receiving a request from the government, the Committee to Protect Journalists’ Mohamed Keita wrote on the organisation’s web site, citing a Tweet by an MTN marketing manager.

“For security reasons, the government of Cameroon requests the suspension of the Twitter SMS integration on the network,” the marketing manager, Bouba Kaele, reportedly wrote in the Tweet, which was later deleted.

A subscriber to MTN Cameroon’s mobile Twitter service told AFP the company had sent clients a message announcing the suspension, citing “reasons beyond (its) control.”

The shut-down comes as President Paul Biya, in power since 1982, confronts calls for an uprising against him circulated via Internet and text messages over the past several weeks.

Government spokesman Issa Tchiroma, who is also the communication minister, told AFP he did not have “perfect knowledge of the situation” surrounding MTN’s Twitter suspension. But, he added, “I remind you of one thing: it is the government’s responsibility to protect the nation.”

South Africa-based MTN launched its mobile Twitter service in Cameroon in November. Some 50 subscribers used the service, according to local blogs and web sites. Twitter is still accessible in Cameroon via Internet.

The government has grown increasingly wary of the role Twitter and other social networks could play in sparking an Egypt- or Tunisia-style uprising, said the director of a local non-government organisation, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“The Cameroonian government dreads more and more the use of social networks to issue calls for resistance” against Biya’s regime, she told AFP, adding that authorities have already issued warnings to MTN Cameroon and Orange-Cameroon, another provider.

Tchiroma said the communication and post and telecommunications ministries had called telecom companies to a meeting last week for a “dialogue with communicators,” and planned to hold similar meetings with the country’s bloggers, web site editors and TV and radio broadcasters.

The words “Jasmine Revolution,” borrowed from the successful Tunisian revolt, were blocked on sites similar to Twitter and on Internet search engines, while cellphone users were unable to send out text messages to multiple recipients. A heavy police presence was reported in several Chinese cities.

In recent days, more than a dozen lawyers and rights activists have been rounded up, and more than 80 dissidents have reportedly been placed under varying forms of house arrest. At least two lawyers are still missing, family members and human rights advocates said Sunday.

In Beijing, a huge crowd formed outside a McDonald’s in the heart of the capital on Sunday after messages went out listing it as one of 13 protest sites across the country. It is not clear who organized the campaign, but it first appeared Thursday on Boxun, a Chinese-language Web site based in the United States, and then spread through Twitter and other microblogging services.

Second, his essay distinguishes between short-term goals and long-term objectives. Most debates over cyberspace versus sovereignty get bogged down by looking for immediate effects. Mr Shirky rightly avoids this. He notes that the technology’s primacy is measured in longer time scales. Its importance lies in lowering the cost of communication and coordination. The argument goes like this: enabling people to communicate among themselves strengthens civil society. This in turn exposes the contradictions between what the authorities say and what truly exists—creating what Mr Shirky calls a “conservative dilemma” (employing a term from media studies). Thus the groundwork is set for reform. The technology simply helped it happen. (Mr Shirky cites Eastern Europe casting off communism to support his point, but the example is more than a bit exaggerated, as Mr Morozov explains in his book.)

Pettegree writes well and amasses information superbly. He refrains from explicitly comparing the technology of print, and its historical impact, with the technology of the Internet. Implicit similarities include issues of intellectual property and privacy, of power, of libel, as well as a general challenge to old modes — the proliferation of personal expression, the contentiousness, the question of how to capitalize, and capitalize upon, a new medium.

This scholarly restraint, leaving his readers to compare and contrast, seems wise. And there are certainly contrasts with the modern age. Describing the immensely popular verse romances like “Orlando Furioso,” for example, Pettegree shows that in the Renaissance these works were not read in the prolonged, silent trance experienced by readers of Dickens or Flaubert. Modern readers recognize the quiet, lone hours spent by Henry James’s character Isabel Archer, that immersive reading experienced not only by devotees of James but by escapist fans of the genre known as “airport books.” In contrast to this industrial-age solitude of print narrative, the 16th-century verse romances and other episodic books like “The Decameron” were suited for reading aloud — enjoyed in a communal, social setting.

In an appended “Note on Sources,” Pettegree allows himself to acknowledge that, “Ironically, it has been the next great information revolution — the Internet — that has allowed this work on the first age of print to be pursued to a successful conclusion.” Digital information newly available from all over the world enhanced his research on early print culture — in all its frequently vulgar, ephemeral, zany and menacing variety.

“Press control has really moved to the center of the agenda,” said David Bandurski, an analyst at the China Media Project of the University of Hong Kong. “The Internet is the decisive factor there. It’s the medium that is changing the game in press control, and the party leaders know this.”

Today, China censors everything from the traditional print press to domestic and foreign Internet sites; from cellphone text messages to social networking services; from online chat rooms to blogs, films and e-mail. It even censors online games.

That’s not all. Not content merely to block dissonant views, the government increasingly employs agents to peddle its views online, in the guise of impartial bloggers and chat-room denizens. And increasingly, it is backing state-friendly clones of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, all Western sites that have been blocked here for roughly a year.

The government’s strategy, according to Mr. Bandurski and others, is not just to block unflattering messages, but to overwhelm them with its own positive spin and rebuttals.

Full story.

“How am I going to live without Google?” asked Wang Yuanyuan, a 29-year-old businessman, as he left a convenience store in Beijing’s business district.

China’s Communist leaders have long tried to balance their desire for a thriving Internet and the economic growth it promotes with their demands for political control. The alarm over Google among Beijing’s younger, better-educated and more Internet savvy citizens — China’s future elite — shows how wobbly that balancing act can be.

By publicly challenging China’s censorship, Google has stirred up the debate over the government’s claim that constraints on free speech are crucial to political stability and the prosperity that has accompanied it. Even if it is unlikely to pose any immediate threat to the Communist Party, Google’s move has clearly discomfited the government, Chinese analysts say.

Full story.

In the midst of the controversy about Google threatening to withdraw from China because of their approach to censorship, it was mentioned in the NYT that some Chinese twitters saw it as a withdrawal from the world by China, not as a withdrawal of Google from China:

China promptly tried to censor the ensuing debate about its censorship, but many Chinese Twitter users went out of their way to praise Google. One from Guangdong declared: “It’s not Google that’s withdrawing from China, it’s China that’s withdrawing from the world.”

There has been an unfortunate tendency for the Sri Lanka government, at least the parts of it responsible for the issuance of visas to withdraw from the world in a similar manner.

Last year, before the LIRNEasia@5 conference that brought close to a 100 people from abroad to Sri Lanka and allowed them to see with their own eyes that there was no blood letting going on, I invited some Canadian journalists to come by and cover some positive stories for a change. I was then informed by the Toronto Star correspondent that he would be glad to come but that the Consulate in Toronto was refusing to issue him a visa until the Star changed its attitude toward Sri Lanka.

Zimbabwe has tried this method for years and all they get is negative coverage. Recently, an intelligent consular official gave a visa to Vikas Bajaj from the New York Times and the result was a wonderful story about a Sri Lankan success in niche marketing. Should I try again to see if the stupid official in Toronto has seen the light? Or is this still a case of Sri Lanka withdrawing from the world?

Oh, and by the way, Mr Consular Official, I got the story covered even without your visa.

It is implanting 6,000 Basij militia centers in elementary schools across Iran to promote the ideals of the Islamic Revolution, and it has created a new police unit to sweep the Internet for dissident voices. A company affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards acquired a majority share in the nation’s telecommunications monopoly this year, giving the Guards de facto control of Iran’s land lines, Internet providers and two cellphone companies. And in the spring, the Revolutionary Guards plan to open a news agency with print, photo and television elements.

Full story.

And yet the Twittering goes on. As states such as Iran crack down on online speech and organizing, clever netizens find ways around the controls. In Iran as well as in China, Burma and parts of the former Soviet Union, there’s an on-again, off-again process of citizens speaking out and states pushing back.

Of course, governments always have the nuclear option when it comes to the Internet: They can shut it down and keep it down. It’s what Burma did when monks took to the streets in 2007. It’s the policy of North Korea and Cuba, where only very few people can access the Internet, usually for very narrow purposes.

Full story in Washington Post.