January 2020

Serbia’s Independent N1 Portal Buffeted by Cyber-Attacks

Posted on January 31, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

N1 said the latest attacks happened last Thursday when a paid DDoS strike from China hit the Serbian website twice that day.

The attacks started on Tuesday and continued on Wednesday afternoon. The second attack was five times stronger, with up to 300,000 access requests hitting the portal server a second.

The Independent Association of Serbian Journalists, NUNS, urged Serbia’s High-tech Crime Prosecutor to urgently discover who was behind the attacks.

They come after a row erupted between the owner of the N1, United Group, and state-owned Telekom Srbija over broadcasting rights.

After the two sides failed to reach a deal, Telekom stopped airing N1’s programmes, causing a stir among the general public and the media community as N1 is among the few remaining independent TV channels in the country.

Luxembourg-based United Group claimed the real reason for the shutdown was political pressure and an attempt to silence government critics and the free media.

But Telekom Serbia denied this, arguing that an agreement was not reached because United Group proposed an extension agreement that was not in line with Serbian legislation.

Support for N1 has meanwhile come from the European Federation of Journalists. “We see the state-owned cable operator’s decision to drop N1 TV as an attempt to silence a critical voice in Serbia,” it said.

Several recent reports have highlighted the lack of media freedom and pluralism in the Serbia, where the media is now largely controlled by the government, it allies or its proxies.

According to the latest annual report by the rights organisation Human Rights Watch, Serbian journalists continue to face attacks and threats, while media plurality has become compromised, with most media now aligned to the ruling party.

Pro-government media outlets frequently smear independent outlets and journalists, describing them as “traitors” and “foreign mercenaries”, the same report noted.

A recent report by Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the University of Oxford said the future of the independent media in Southeast Europe remained uncertain as a result of political hostility and ownership concentration under politically connected moguls.

Montenegro Detains Activist for Predicting ‘War’ on Facebook

Posted on January 29, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

Montenegro’s state prosecution on Tuesday ordered civic activist Vesko Pejak to be put into custody for 72 hours for causing panic and disorder over a Facebook post predicting “war in Montenegro” – and for claiming that officials were provoking citizens who opposed the recently adopted law on religion.

The law has angered the largest faith group in the country, the Serbian Orthodox Church, and tens of thousands of people have been marching twice weekly in the streets in protest against it.

The Serbian Church, SPC, says it is designed to strip it of its property and land, which the government denies. Opposition political movements are also regular participants in the anti-government rallies.

The Center for Investigative Reporting in Montenegro, CIN-CG, said that by arresting people solely for their thoughts, the government threatened freedom of thought and expression, which is one of the cornerstones of democracy.

“We appeal to all actors in the public arena to take the greatest responsibility regard to the situation and not to exacerbate tensions,” the CIN-CG press release said.

“We urge the authorities to release Pejak and to no longer stifle freedom of speech and freedom of movement,” a member of the Alternative movement, Nikola Bezmarevic, told the media.

The main opposition group, the pro-Serbian Democratic Front also condemned the arrest.

The government has been clamping down hard lately on activists spreading “panic” on social media.

On January 24 police detained a well-known pro-Russian journalist, Igor Damjanovic, over his conversation on Facebook with another person who then filed a case against him. Damjanovic claimed the real reason for his detention was not his verbal exchange on Facebook but his long record of anti-NATO activism, which has irked the government.

On January 23 in a separate case concerning Facebook comments, police arrested Milija Goranovic from Niksic for allegedly insulting the country’s police chief, Veselin Veljovic. Media reports said Goranovic was fined 500 euros for telling Veljovic “not to talk rubbish” below a statement of the police director on Facebook.

One day after Goranovic was arrested, the US ambassador to Montenegro, Judy Rising Renke, reminded the government on twitter that freedom of speech was fundamental to democracy. “This really worries me. Public figures are routinely criticized and even insulted – it’s part of the job. I know. However, at the end of the day, we must defend the right to free speech,” she posted.

Two editors of local news websites, IN4S and Borba, Gojko Raicevic and Drazen Zivkovic, were detained on January 12 on suspicion of causing panic and public disorder. This was in connection with reports of an explosion at the Villa Gorica, a building in Podgorica used by the government for receptions. After they published their stories, some regional media republished the alleged information. The police later denied that any explosion had occurred and said that a minor electrical failure had occurred at the villa, which was soon repaired. They said Raicevic and Zivkovic were arrested for publishing information that had alarmed the public without checking the facts.

On January 5, the editor-in-chief of the Fos media website, Andjela Djikanovic was placed in detention for 72 hours for “causing panic and disorder” after claiming in an article that the government might call on security forces in neighbouring Kosovo to help quell Serbian Church supporters’ protests over the new legislation on religion.

The government has defended its tough response, however, saying it is coming under a systemic and organized attack. On January 14, the Culture Ministry said that the country had become the target of an organised “disinformation campaign” since it adopted the new law on religion. Authorities say they are the victims of a coordinated campaign to spread fake news, organised by a number of media outlets in the country and the region that are spreading religious and national hatred and violence.

‘Teenage Porn’ Network Scandal Rocks North Macedonia

Posted on January 27, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

The alleged founder of a social group called “Javna Soba” [Public Room], which is at the centre of a scandal in North Macedonia involving teen pornography, on Monday insisted that his original intention had been innocent.

This group, hosted by the Russian social network Telegram, hit the spotlight over the weekend after two news sites that managed to get access to the group reported that it served as an exchange for pornographic material – often from teenage girls.

The group originally had some 7,400 members, and according to the reports, in some instances, the group also contained the alleged identifies and even the phone numbers of the girls whose materials were shared, causing even greater concern.

“We wanted to make a group for sharing funny videos and in no case pornography,” the alleged administrator of the group who goes by the nickname “Medo” told local A1On news site, which broke the scandal in the first place.

But “things got out of control”, said the administrator, whose identity was not known to the news site, adding that ever since he had fruitlessly tried to close the group, although closing his personal account reportedly did not help.

The existence of this group, which cannot be joined without a direct invitation from a member, shocked North Macedonia over the weekend, raising concern about the safety of the private data of the children and teenagers, as well as about public morality.

A1On previously reported that it had spotted phone numbers listed in this group that were known to belong to local public figures.

On Sunday, the Interior Ministry said it was working on the case. “The computer crime and forensics sector has immediately contacted the ‘Telegram’ network in order to get the needed info on the functioning of this group,” ministry spokesperson Toni Angelovski said.

He urged people to report any misuse of photos regarding this and other possible cases.

Caretaker Prime Minister Oliver Spasovski told a press conference on Sunday that the group had only been formed recently, and had gained popularity very quickly.

“From the data I got from the Public Safety Bureau, a procedure has been launched … they are working on revealing the administrator and members of this group,” Spasovski said.

The head of the First Children’s Embassy – Megjashi, an NGO based in Skopje, Dragi Zmijanac, on Monday urged society to do more to prevent minors being abused.

“This is a moral degradation of the whole of society, where children are left on their own,” Zmijanac told the Sloboden Pecat news portal.

According to reports by A1On, the group is still active on Telegram, but since the scandal broke, under a different name – and with a drastically reduced membership.

Sergiu Bozianu: Moldova Still Doesn’t ‘Get’ Privacy Law

Posted on January 27, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

Sergiu Bozianu, president of the Association for the Protection of Privacy in Moldova, told BIRN in an interview that respect for privacy remains a problem in Moldova, especially when it comes to the so-called force institutions.

The lawyer says the authorities should follow the European pattern and create a unique register of all intercepted ways of communication, surveillance or special investigative measures.

“Special investigative measures are of a secretive nature. Nobody must know them, or we won’t catch thieves anymore. But every special investigative measure should be recorded somewhere,” he says.

He also says that, after a time, if the prosecutors do not find anything about the person who was the target of the special measures, that person should be notified about the procedures.

When it comes to the General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR, Moldova, despite having adopted this European law, has implemented it in an ambiguous way, reflecting the fact that parliamentarians do not seem eager to take a strong stand on the matter.

In June 2019, in the last days of Pavel Filip’s Democratic Party government, an journalistic investigation done by media outlet RISE Moldova revealed that the Interior Minister had authorized special surveillance actions on 52 members of the pro-European opposition, civil society members and journalists.

The 52 were psychically monitored, their phones tapped and cameras and microphones were even installed in their apartments. These major violations of their private lives were justified by alleged suspicions that they were planning a coup.

“From what I know from the media – because there have been no official reactions – some criminal cases have started [on these cases of illegal surveillance],” Bozianu said.

“But given the level of public interest in this activity, the bodies concerned should come up with statements on the subject – to clearly state what was done, and what the results were,” he added.

Bozianu mentioned another big problem in Moldova on privacy, besides the questionable actions of the authorities.

“We are talking here about private security agencies and the detectives who confuse their security activity in the private sector with police interception,” he said.

Bozianu said members of private security agencies often do exactly what the police do, even though they are not allowed to, by law. “Usually, these are former police officers or secret service employees, and they do the same activities in the private sector after they leave the official system,” he explained.

Confusion about what law really says:

Moldova first adopted a law on the protection of personal data in 2007-2008, after it ratified Convention 108 of the Council of Europe’s 1981 treaty for the protection of individuals regarding the automated processing of personal data. This was replaced by the current law, Law 133, for the protection of personal data, that remains in force until now.

The Moldovan lawyer, Sergiu Bozianu, speaking at a conference about the rights to a private life in Chisinau, Moldova, September 18, 2019. Photo: Sergiu Bozianu`s Facebook account

But Bozianu said it was problematic that communication officers of state institutions in Moldova now often refuse to reply to media requests for information by misinterpreting the protection of personal data law.

“Lately, it has become fashionable to invoke the regime of personal data. But this does not mean that [information] should not be published and revealed, if the grounds are that it is of public interest or concerns public money and public offices. It must be published,” he added.

He also criticised the “selective justice” in the past years by which some TV channels seemed to have preferential access to the personal data of important politicians – usually political adversaries of the authorities, like the former jailed prime minister Vlad Filat, the archenemy of the oligarch Vlad Plahotniuc, who still owns the biggest media empire in Moldova.

The lawyer also argues that the present law has flaws, with high corruption trials mostly kept secret. “When it comes to the divorce of two spouses, everything is published, about how they cheated, with whom, if they got hit and so on,” he complained.

“Today, we have a major problem with the publication of court rulings. We publish data when it is not needed – and do not publish data when it is needed. Corruption cases are all anonymised,” he said.

For those who break the privacy law, there are five types of penalty, with a maximum fine of 15,000 lei [750 euros] applicable. Theoretically, prison is also possible, stipulated in Article 177 of the penal code on the inviolability of personal life.

However, while this article is taken from Russian legislation, the law on the protection of personal data was transposed from EU law, namely from Directive 9546.

“We have tried to make a hybrid that does not work,” he suggests. “We have introduced something with national specific [judiciary provisions], and from a predictable European act, have made an unpredictable law that is outdated and inapplicable,” he adds.

Moves to improve law stuck in parliament:

The General Data Protection Regulation came into force in Moldova on May 25, 2018. Bozianu has been fighting for amendments since then, but a bill with these amendments has now been in the parliament since 2018 – although it was won a positive vote at the first reading.

Moldovan deputies taking a vote in the Parliament. Photo: EPA/Doru Dumitru

“This bill is a very important one for us, because it comes with a new regulation in the field of data protection, and from a European perspective,” Bozianu said.

The lawyer said it was imperative for Moldova to better implement all European law requirements, especially from the perspective of trade with EU markets.

“We need to have a law that would give us fair competition in relation to other economic agents,” he says. “If a Moldovan company wants to enter the European market or provide services there, it must comply with European requirements regarding GDPR,” he stresses.

Bozianu says Moldova must comply with European GDPR regarding social media accounts as well. He argues that if Moldovan citizens do certain actions on Facebook, they now risk being sanctioned under European GDPR.

“European GPDR applies in many situations in Moldova … when we store in the cloud on Facebook’s server, we actually store in the EU,” he notes. “All the information about Facebook users is in the EU – and that is where the GDPR applies,” he concludes.

Selling .ORG Puts Civil Society at Risk

Posted on January 23, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

Executive directors of 11 international NGOs released an open letter calling on the leaders of Internet Society (ISOC) and Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to stop the sale of the .ORG top-level domain to private equity firm Ethos Capital.

“.ORG is the place where civil society and NGOs reside in the digital environment. Both the physical and virtual world have become increasingly inhospitable and risky for civil society organizations who face constant surveillance, online censorship, and even more physical risks and legal restrictions on their operations and personnel. This proposed sale presents an additional danger to civil society and undermines the safety and stability of the digital space for countless non-governmental organizations, their partners, and their broader communities,” the letter reads.

Signers include the directors of Greenpeace International, Human Rights Watch, International Trade Union Confederation, Amnesty International, 350.org, Transparency International, Access Now, Sierra Club, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Consumer Reports, and Color of Change. The letter is being officially released in Davos at the World Economic Forum, where global business, government, and social leaders are gathered to discuss priorities for 2020 and beyond.

“Free expression around the world is increasingly endangered by government and corporate players, which is why we are joining other civil society organizations in making public our concerns over the .ORG sale,” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “The internet is crucial to the integrity of civil liberties and human rights work, and also the safety of those doing it. The security of civil society should not be entrusted to private equity.”

“Even more so than what .ORG would look like in the next five years, I’m deeply worried about its fate in 2040,” said Brett Solomon, Executive Director of Access Now. “If .ORG is transferred to the private sector, it would inevitably make its way into the hands of those who stand to gain from its control and are willing the pay the price to have it — that could be, for example, the Saudi or Chinese government, or surveillance tech investors like Novalpina Capital.”

There has been a resounding rejection of the sale from the .ORG community and other concerned stakeholders around the world, in particular due to the lack of transparency around the deal and the absence of safeguards for the domain’s continued stability, security, and accessibility. Nearly 700 organizations and over 20,000 individuals have signed on to the SaveDotOrg petition calling to stop the sale.

Corruption Fight Faltering in Balkans, Central Europe, Transparency Says

Posted on January 23, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia scored worst in the Western Balkan region with 36 and 35 points respectively, which put them in 101st and 106th place on a list of 180 countries.

Both declined from last year, when Bosnia was ranked in 89th place, with 38 points, and North Macedonia came in 93rd place, with 37 points.

Bosnia shares its 106^th place with Albania, which also declined in the rankings. It came in 99^th place last year.

Bosnia’s western neighbour, EU member Croatia, fell from 60^th place last year to 63^rd place in 2019, its score declining from 48 to 47 points.

The scores for its eastern and southern neighbours, Serbia and Montenegro, did not change.

Serbia, however, fell in the rankings from 87^th to 91^st place, while Montenegro slightly improved its position, moving up from 67^th place in 2018 to 66^th place in the 2019 list.

Moldova scored worst in the whole of Southeast and Central Europe. With 33 points, it ranked in 120^th place on the list.

Greece, on the other hand, saw the biggest improvement in Southeast Europe, scoring 48 points and ranking in 60^th place.

This year’s Transparency International report also compared the latest results with those from 2012. In that context, in the Balkans, Bosnia’s result again appeared concerning, revealing a consistent decline. “With a score of 36, Bosnia and Herzegovina significantly declined by six points on the CPI since 2012,” the report noted.

Turning to Bosnia’s specific problems, it noted: “The country also suffers from weak enforcement of campaign finance regulations. During the 2018 elections, political parties and civil society organizations raised concerns over voting irregularities, threats against voters, the misuse of public resources and unequal access to the media.”

Global Corruption Perception Index for 2019. Photo: Transparency International

The organisation divides all countries into six geographical groups: Americas, Western Europe and the EU, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia Pacific.

It then measures perceived levels of corruption in each state and awards points from 0 to 100. A score of 100 points means “very clean” and 0 means “highly corrupted”. Based on the score, TI then compiles a ranking list.

Lidija Prokic, from Transparency International, told BIRN that the scores were in some ways more important than the ranking. “Rank is good in the sense that it gives us a picture of where a particular country stands in the wider and regional environment,” she explained. “But when we look at what is happening at a level of the country, it is more important for us to look at the score, because then we can see if there is any notable improvement or decline,” she said.

Prokic told BIRN that, on average, the group of countries containing the Balkans scored higher only than the African countries.

Looking at these countries as a whole, she said TI detected an overall declining trend. “We see a lot of effort to weaken the regulations that require disclosure of party campaigns [expenses],” she told BIRN. Efforts could also be seen to “bring money from unknown sources to political life”, she added.

“What certainly influenced the score is governments’ efforts to limit the space for civil society, limit the possibility for independent control and silence critical voices,” she added.

EU countries in Central Europe ranked higher than countries in the Balkans. Poland was ranked in 41^st place, the Czech Republic in 44^th place and Slovakia in 59^th place.

But some EU member countries in Central Europe and the Balkans lagged far behind.

Hungary and Romania both came in 70^th place and Bulgaria was even lower down, in 74^th place.

As for the winners, there were few surprises. Eight of the top ten places on the list went to EU countries in Western Europe, namely Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Netherland, Germany and Luxembourg and also Switzerland and Norway.

The only two from outside the region were New Zealand and Singapore. All of them scored 80 to 87 points.

Prokic said that in the field of regulation and institutional integrity, those countries were still in a better position than many non-EU states, but the trends were worrying.

Independent Media in Central and Southeast Europe Under ‘Assault’ – Report

Posted on January 22, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

Reuters Institute report says ownership concentration and government hostility threaten the future of independent journalism throughout Central and Eastern Europe.

Independent media developed in Central and Eastern Europe “in a dizzyingly short time frame” after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, a new Reuters Institute report says – but its future remains uncertain as a result of politicians’ hostility and ownership concentration under politically well connected moguls.

The report, Fighting Words: Journalism Under Assault in Central and Eastern Europe, issued on Wednesday by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the University of Oxford evaluates the situation of the media in the region by drawing on interviews with about a hundred journalists in 16 countries during 2019.

“In Europe, one of the safest continents in the world for press freedom, three journalists have been murdered in the last three years,” author Meera Selva of the Reuters Institute writes.

The report goes on to list the deaths of Daphne Caruana Galizia in Malta, a country out of the area of study, Jan Kuciak in Slovakia and Viktoria Marinova in Bulgaria, all killed while reporting “on government corruption and organised crime”.

“They [the killings] happened in a climate where many journalists have been attacked and undermined and discredited by politicians, where the media have been captured or financially weakened, and where lawsuits have been used to systematically hamper and inhibit the pursuit of investigative, independent journalism,” the study said.

The report recalls that the 27-year-old Slovak journalist shot dead alongside his fiancée in February 2018 was part of a group of reporters who then prime minister Robert Fico in November 2016 called “anti-Slovak prostitutes” who “don’t inform” but just “fight with the government”.

Similarly aggressive language has been used against journalists in recent months in the Czech Republic, which two years ago dropped from 23rd place to 40th in the World Press Freedom Index, partly due to the concentration of media ownership “driven by the current Prime Minister Andrej Babis”.

In the Western Balkans, the report notes, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama “frequently refers to journalists as rubbish bins (kazan), while the leader of the opposition, Lulzim Basha, refers to the media as ‘captured and bought.’”

Rama’s government has also passed a set of so-called anti-defamation laws that allow state agencies to hear complaints about news sites, demand retractions, impose fines and even suspend their activity, the report reads.

In Montenegro, an investigative journalist, Olivera Lakic, was shot in the leg in May 2018. A month before, President Milo Djukanovic accused the publication she worked for, Vijesti, of promoting “fascist ideas”, after the newspaper revealed the business dealings of Djukanovic’s son’s when he was the ruling party leader.

Montenegrian journalist Olivera Lakic at the offices of Vijesti newspaper in Podgorica, Montenegro, 11 May 2018. Archive photo: EPA-EFE/BORIS PEJOVIC

Around 63 per cent of those who took part in the survey said politicians had criticized them in public speeches or on social media because of content they had published.

Some of the respondents said their harassers had used the same online space that has made publications known for their “fearless anti-corruption reporting”, such as Hungary’s 444.hu and Slovakia’s aktuality.sk, to troll and threaten them.

Over 64 per cent of those questioned said they had been victims of attacks because of their profession. Of that number, 83.3 per cent said they were attacked online, with over 16 per cent of them seeing sensitive personal information revealed online by their tormentors.

Media turned into government cartel

Marius Dragomir, whose own report, Media Capture in Europe, is quoted in the study, said: “The collusion between the political class and media owners has reached unprecedented levels, leading to a phenomenon known as media capture, a situation where most or all of the news media institutions are operating as part of a government-business cartel that controls and manipulates the flow of information with the aim of protecting their unrestricted and exclusive access to public resources.”

The report said the media had been exposed to this process in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Bulgaria, among others, “where several commercial media outlets were sold to businessmen who wanted to use the media to boost their political influence”.

In Bulgaria, the report notes how a parliamentarian, Delyan Peevski, “who also owns the country’s largest cigarette manufacturer, gained control of a large number of media outlets, which he uses in an openly partisan way”.

A picture made available 13 April 2014 shows Bulgarian media mogul and politician Delyan Peevski during a meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria, 17 February 2012. Archive photo: EPA/STR

Hungary was described as the “most egregious case” of “media capture”. The report said: “Between 2014 and 2018 ownership of news assets shifted to and increasingly concentrated in the hands of pro-government oligarchs.”

Governments use the partisan distribution of advertising by the state and public companies against independent media in Hungary, Poland and Serbia, the report added.

Libel lawsuits and anti-terror laws used as weapons

Independent publications in these countries are also systematically subjected to lawsuits focusing on libel and defamation, while anti-terror and national security legislation is also used to make their work difficult.

“In many countries, freedom of information and national security laws essentially cancel one another out,” the report suggested.

One such case of this was Bosnia and Herzegovina, where “the Freedom of Access to Information Act guarantees access to most public records, but the Law on Protection of Secret Data denies access to information of most interest to journalists”.

In neighbouring Croatia, it added, “laws against defaming and insulting the state and its symbols, and laws against publishing what the law refers to as ‘humiliating’ media content, can be used to go after journalists even for publishing proven facts”.

In March 2019, it noted, the Croatian Journalists’ Association, CJA, held a rally to draw attention to 1,100 ongoing lawsuits filed by politicians, public figures and corporations against journalists. “The public broadcaster alone had filed 36 lawsuits against its own employees and others,” the study pointed out.

The protection of sources is often compromised in the region by the violations of journalists’ privacy.

Professionals interviewed in the study described being subjected to phone tapping and recording, email interceptions and pressures to reveal their sources.

Journalists listed the support of media organisations in their own countries as the most important source of protection against such pressures. Help with legal costs and support from international organizations came next.

EDRi Publishes Guide for Ethical Website Development and Maintenance

Posted on January 19, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

European Digital Rights, EDRi, released the new guide for ethical website development and maintenance, Ethical Web Dev.

The guide is aimed at web developers and maintainers who have a strong understanding of technical concepts, to assist them in bringing the web back to its roots – a decentralised tool that can enhance fundamental rights, democracy and freedom of expression.

The goal of the project, which started more than a year ago, was to provide guidance to developers on how to move away from third-party infected, data-leaking, unethical and unsafe practices.

The guide is a result of an extensive collective work, with inputs from experts of the EDRi network (Anders Jensen-Urstad, Walter van Holst, Maddalena Falzoni, Hanno “Rince” Wagner, Piksel), external contributions (Gordon Lennox, Achim Klabunde, Laura Kalbag, Aral Balkan), and the crucial help of Sid Rao, Public Interest Technologist and ex-Ford-Mozilla Fellow at EDRi.

The guide is distributed under a Creative Commons 4.0 Licence.

Download:

Ethical Web Dev – Guide for ethical website development and maintenance
https://edri.org/files/ethical_web_dev_web.pdf

Wikipedia Available Again in Turkey

Posted on January 16, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

Turkey restored the access to Wikipedia after blocking its content for more than two and a half years.

This latest development follows a 26 December 2019 ruling by the Constitutional Court of Turkey that the block imposed by the Turkish government was unconstitutional. Earlier on Thursday, the Turkish Constitutional Court made the full text of that ruling available to the public, and shortly after, Wikipedia Foundation received reports that access was restored to the website.

“We are thrilled to be reunited with the people of Turkey,” said Katherine Maher, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. “At Wikimedia we are committed to protecting everyone’s fundamental right to access information. We are excited to share this important moment with our Turkish contributor community on behalf of knowledge-seekers everywhere.”

Wikipedia filed a petition also before the European Court of Human Rights in spring of last year, and in July, the Court granted the case priority status.

Wikipedia is a global free knowledge resource written and edited by people around the world.

More than 85 percent of the articles on Wikipedia are in languages other than English, which includes the Turkish Wikipedia’s more than 335,000 articles, written by Turkish-speaking volunteers for Turkish-speaking people.

Poland and Serbia Send Most Requests to Twitter

Posted on January 15, 2020January 26, 2023 by BIRD

Serbia and Poland are the leading countries in south and central Europe when it comes to information, government and removal requests, says Twitter’s report, which provides insights into the trends and analytics of Twitter and Periscope.

Its latest published data, which cover the period from January to June 2019, show Poland sent 56 account information requests. Based on the received inquiries, Twitter produced information in only 2 per cent of them.

Information requests include government and non-government legal requests that the social network company received for account information, including Twitter and Periscope.

The second-ranking country in the same period was Serbia, from where 27 account information requests were directed. Twitter produced some information in more cases concerning Serbia than Poland – in 7 per cent of them.

The Czech Republic and North Macedonia share third place when it comes to information requests; both sent four requests. Twitter did not produce any information based on them.

Bosnia sent three account information requests over the period. Twitter also didn’t produce any information from them.

Kosovo and Montenegro only submitted emergency disclosure requests – one each. Twitter produced zero information from them.

Case-by-case

Twitter may disclose account information to law enforcement agencies in response to a valid emergency disclosure request.

“We evaluate such requests on a case-by-case basis to determine if there is information to support a good-faith belief that there is an imminent threat, involving danger of death or serious physical injury to a person,” Twitter said in its explanation.

In these situations, it added, if there is information relevant to averting or mitigating a threat, Twitter may disclose that information to law-enforcement bodies.

When it came to emergency disclosure requests by governments between January and June 30, 2019, Poland and Serbia again led, with 21 and 13 emergency disclosure requests.

In Poland’s case, in 5 per cent of the requests, Twitter produced some information. For Serbia, the figure was 15 per cent. The Czech Republic directed three emergency disclosure requests to Twitter, but the company didn’t produce any information based on them. Kosovo and Montenegro sent one request, but no information was produced.

Legal demands

Removal requests include worldwide legal demands from governments and other authorized reporters, as well as reports based on local laws from trusted reporters and non-governmental organizations, to remove or withhold content, Twitter explained.

It added that governments and law enforcement agencies, organizations chartered to combat discrimination, and lawyers representing individuals are among the many complainants that submit such legal requests.

Poland was also the leader in this field, submitting 10 legal demands – but Twitter did not withhold any content as a result of them. Serbia made two such demands, and Albania one, but again – they did not result in content being withheld.

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