BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

27/01/2010

Belarus tightens screws on embattled internet users - Feature

DPA

Minsk - Belarus' authoritarian government has imposed even tighter controls over internet traffic, leaving the former Soviet republic's embattled web users with few means of communication not monitored by the state. Earlier this month, President Aleksander Lukashenko authorized the national the Intelligence Analysis Centre (OAC), an agency directly subordinate to his office, to break into practically any internet traffic moving to, from or within Belarus. Lukashenko cited a need to combat crime.

This step dramatically widens the already harsh government controls over communications in the country.

"These (measures) are aimed at the development of of electronic mail as incriminating evidence", said Andrei Bastunets, a lawyer employed by the Belarusian Association of Journalists. "They expand the centre's power substantially."

Lukashenko's crackdown on free internet use, coming almost simultaneously with the US-China spat over Beijing-imposed barriers to Chinese user access to the world-wide web, has so far passed almost without comment from the international community.

One exception has been Reporters Without Borders, which issued a statement of protest, saying the decree once effective would make Belarus "fall to the level of North Korea and China ... as an 'enemy of the internet.'"

Before the January 14 order, Bastunets said, Belarus' secret police - the KGB - had been the main monitor of internet activity, intercepting such communication with the aim of collecting foreign intelligence and hunting down foreign spies.

In 2006 and 2009, opposition communications by e-mail, Skype, and SMS played a key role in organizing of anti-government protests.

Protesters managed to gather by the tens of thousands in the capital Minsk, despite government efforts to prevent information about the planned demonstrations reaching the public. Those efforts included the shutting down of opposition websites and temporary jailing of opposition leaders.

The OAC's authority under the January law is dramatically wider than the KGB's and is aimed squarely at the Belarusian opposition, Bastunets said, allowing the agency to intercept and decrypt, without a court order, any e-mail, SMS or telephone conversation in the country - and then prosecute any user found in violation of national media law.

The new code likewise made the Lukashenko-subordinated OAC the main government censor for any still and video image going to or from Belarus via the Internet, and responsible for blocking any website deemed "unsuitable" for Belarusian Internet users, he said.

Officials at the OAC declined to respond to a request by the German Press Agency

Source:

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/306088,belarus-tightens-screws-on-embattled-internet-users--feature.html


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