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Greetings!
I hope you'll forgive our Newsletter taking two months off as we focused on the latest annual update to the Global Integrity Report. Now that we're back, we have some exciting announcements. You'll read about all of this below, but I want to highlight the update to the Global Integrity Report. Updated with 55 new local assessments, the Report now covers 76 countries. This is, we believe, an essential tool for anyone hoping to understand governance and anti-corruption issues today. There's a tremendous volume of deep, unpacked content there, and even in the Global Integrity office, we're still discovering fascinating insights buried in the raw scorecards. I invite you to explore the Global Integrity Report, and let us know what you think. Best regards, Nathaniel Heller Managing Director, Global Integrity
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FEATURED ANALYSIS
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Internet Censorship: A Comparative Study
This short analysis has sparked quite a following -- within a week of publication, we had 50 media and blog citations and more than 10,000 new readers.
Using data from the Global Integrity Index,
we put a U.S. court's recent order to block access to anti-corruption
site Wikileaks.org (covered here) into context. In summary: The Wikileaks.org shutdown
is unheard of in the West, and has only been seen in a handful of the
most repressive regimes. Good thing it doesn't work very well.
Read the full analysis at our new blog, the Global Integrity Commons...
Exerpts from "Internet Censorship: A Comparative Study"
- Algeria has no firewalls or filters, but outlaws hosting content critical of the government, and monitors chat rooms for political speech.
- China is home to 1.3 billion people and has a highly scalable technological approach based on extensive content filters known satirically as the Great Firewall of China. China also uses technology to discourage content creation, deploying cute animated police characters to remind Internet users they are being watched.
- Egypt has limited technical means to discourage content creation, so it
relies on an old-fashioned technique -- harassment, beatings and
arrests. Hala Al-Masry used to publish in a blog entitled "Cops Without Boundaries"
until the government harassed her, "unknown people" beat her father,
and she and her husband were arrested and signed a commitment to shut
down the blog. Similar techniques have shut down websites of opposition parties.
- Kazakhstan has little Internet capacity. The government uses this to mask
censorship -- rather than block sites, it slows them down, frustrating
the users of political content into looking elsewhere. The KNB
(formerly the KGB) has a special program called Bolat,
which slows down, but does not stop, access to sites of terrorist
organizations. Popular opinion holds that it is used to slow opposition
party sites as well.
- Russia has a mixed bag of state persecution and neglect,
allowing a rare opening for free expression in a country with highly
restricted media. However, the sophistication of the attacks that do
occur is frightening, with hackers singling out individual online
targets. For instance, the website of Ekho Moskvy, a liberal Moscow
radio station critical of the Kremlin, was brought down by a DDoS
attack last year.
- Thailand's military junta moved
aggressively to shut down message boards and the former-ruling party
Thai Rak Thai website after taking over the country in 2006. But the
junta's censorship cops work to keep the thinnest appearance of
tolerance -- message boards were allowed to reopen under the condition
that they did not "provoke any misunderstandings." Message received.
Read the full analysis here.
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INSIDE GLOBAL INTEGRITY |
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 New Blog -- The Global Integrity Commons -- needs your contributions
Global Integrity has launched The Global Integrity Commons, a new blog and discussion portal. Unlike the annually updated Global Integrity Report, this space hosts a bottom-up discussion of governance issues with daily input from Global Integrity's extended network of local journalists, academics and researchers.
That includes you, newsletter reader! If you have material you want the governance and anti-corruption community to know about, or have something you think we should be looking into, please drop a note to info@globalintegrity.org. New academic work, organization studies, or previously published reporting are all fair game -- if it's about corruption or governance don't be shy about self promoting.
Source data for Global Integrity Index published for the first time
For the first time, the entire source dataset
for the Global Integrity Index is available for download at no cost.
Use, remix and correlate to your heart's content, and if you find
something interesting, please send us a note with your results, and we
may be able to help you publish them. Additionally, we have consolidated all of our downloadable datasets onto one page.
Also worth noting is that the Global Integrity Report and Global Integrity Index have a new home on the Web, which should make these resources easier to use.
Redesigned Website: www.globalintegrity.org
We've given the Global Integrity site a new look, and reorganized it to make the content that is most important to our users easier to find. Take a look and let us know how we did by replying to this email. |
OTHER ORGANIZATIONS
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Training Offered for Anti-Corruption Agency Staff
Luis De Sousa, a Global Integrity contributor in Portugal, is offering
to train anti-corruption agency staff. The Second Meeting of the
Network on Anti-Corruption Agencies (ANCORAGE-NET) will take place at
the University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE) on 14-16 May 2008.
Details and application instructions are here.
Do you have an event or announcement you would like help promoting? We'd like to hear from you. Simply reply to this email.
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Global Integrity is an independent, non-profit organization tracking
governance and corruption trends around the world. Global Integrity
uses local teams of researchers and journalists to monitor openness and
accountability. Our website is www.globalintegrity.org.
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