Outside, darkness colored by the top of the Empire State Building and it's neighbors. Inside, the glow of holiday lights adorning the night. This is the typical setting for my blogging. After night falls, the apartment is all mine and I get to unleash the muses. I take my freedom to blog for granted, as normal a function of my being, as is eating, sleeping or breathing.

Yet everyday bloggers around the world are harassed, persecuted, imprisoned or even sentenced to death for doing what they do best: speak Truth to Power. By being the de facto tool for citizen journalists, blogs have become the #1 public enemy of repressive governments around the world.

Reporters without Borders keeps track of journalists and bloggers who have been persecuted or killed for their work and just this 29th of January they reported the arrest of Burmese blogger Nay Myo Latt. Nay is an opposition activist and owner of cybercafes who took to blogging to write about the repression unleashed after the fall demonstrations against the government.

He wrote about how the government blocked access to Blogger, how they've stepped up their online surveillance tactics and how they government has gone as far as to redirect activist blogs to pornographic sites or comment troll blogs that criticize their tactics.

Another example of blogger repression is Hu Jia of China, an AIDS activist and dissent who along with his wife and newborn baby, was put under house arrest for a third time for "subverting state authority".

Yet in what may be a first, a journalism student in Afghanistan was sentenced to death for printing an article from a blog, reading it and disseminating it.

Global Voice Online reports :

According to Afghan Penlog and international media, Parwez Kambakhsh was detained by the authorities on October 27, 2007 for downloading and distributing an article that he found on an Iranian weblog to friends. It spoke of women's rights, the Quran and the Prophet Mohammed. A local court in northern Afghanistan in Mazar-e Sharif has convicted him to death for the alleged blasphemy.

It has been revealed though that Mr. Kambakhsh was being targeted in retaliation for his brother's work as a journalist. Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi is a journalist who covers corruption and human rights abuses in the northern provinces.

In the United States the buzz around blogs is "how much money can I make from it". Elsewhere in the world it seems the main preoccupation is how to blog without being disappeared into a prison or just simply killed.

For this matter, Global Voices Online has created Blog for a Cause!: The Global Voices Guide of Blog Advocacy. It builds upon advice culled by Reporters Without Borders in the groundbreaking Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents and goes further. It not only takes into consideration all the online surveillance tactics regimes have developed in the last 2 1/2 years since its publication. It also gives tips on the basics of cross-cultural and transnational political strategizing.

A fantastic example of their advice :

One example of how not to start an advocacy blog is the Free Alaa blog2, which lobbied for the freedom of jailed Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah in 2006. I, along with other international bloggers, started the Free Alaa blog without coordinating well with Alaa's wife and friends in Egypt. This was counter-productive because Alaa's wife Manal was trying to organize all information about her husband through their shared blog, Alaa and Manal's Bit Bucket .

In addition, Alaa later revealed that the presence of our blog, which has since been taken down, actually caused him to be held in jail longer because the government saw him as more high-profile and thus as a greater threat.

Whenever I read the political conditions in which other citizen journalists and writers do what I take for granted, I feel a tinge of remorse for having it relatively easy.

And then I have to remind myself of the White House's attempt to grant immunity to telecommunications companies that assisted the government into the illegal wiretapping US civilians. Or how a lobbying organization like the RIAA wants to have unfettered access to my digital privacy in a vain attempt to curtail all fair use of anything they deem their intellectual property. Or I just simply remind myself how Homeland Security does indeed consider bloggers a national security threat and, well, I have to reckon that what happens abroad compared to the US may be just a matter of style.

Image Source :
Screenshot of BBC webpage.