Former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad who granted the Internet its Malaysian “bill of rights” is the most outspoken defender of the rights and has spoken out fiercely at past and recent attempts to curb the freedom of what goes on in cyberspace. IT MUST have been a relief to many, probably to most Malaysians, that Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak put his foot down on attempts to limit Internet access. For a while there many people thought that finally those who had always wanted to firewall certain sites of the Internet are getting their way – that the government had finally given in to demands that it break its own pledge never to censor the Internet.

Russian hackers are believed to have been behind a “single, massively coordinated attack” on some of the world’s leading websites last week — all in an effort to silence a pro-Georgian blogger. Millions of people were locked out of Twitter and Facebook after cyber-attacks on the social networking sites on Thursday. LiveJournal, a blogging service, was also hit, although Google, the world’s most popular site, said that it was able to repel the onslaught. Under such “denial-of-service” attacks, sites are deluged with traffic in an attempt to bring them down.

The Centre for Independent Journalism (CIJ) views with concern plans afoot to filter the Internet to block so called undesirable websites, as reported in the local media. This is a clear violation of the commitment made in the promotion of the Multimedia Super Corridor and the Bill of Guarantees that ensures no censorship of the internet. Any form of control or filtering is a violation of freedom of speech, as enshrined in Article 10 of the Federal Constitution. The Malaysian Insider, an online news portal, reported on 6 August 2009 that a call for tender has been issued to companies to submit proposals to assist the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) evaluate the feasibility of an Internet filter.

In the midst of a troubled [since the presidential election, ed.] Iran, the police have begun to physically remove and destroy satellite receivers within residential homes. This is done in a massive effort to prevent people from obtaining news with foreign TV-stations, which are outside the Iranian regime's control. That is the report of a German human rights organization, saying that Iranian citizens now only have the Internet as an impartial source of information - and that this media is also subject to very strict censorship. Every internet provider in Iran has been linked to the rest of the world through a central hub inside the National Iranian telecommunications company, TCI. There, an ingenious system has been installed to keep track of all user's movements through cyberspace, recording the electronic communication and allowing to block any unwanted content.