Tunisian blogger Sami Ben Gharbia reports on the state of cyber activism in Tunisia with a post that appeared both in Global Voices Advocacy and in his Fikra Blog.

Three more blogs have been blocked in Tunisia this week. These blogs, Mochagheb (Disturber), Ennaqed (The Critic) and Place Mohamed Ali have all been particularly active in providing news of the struggle of The Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT), and especially about the latest social unrest in the southwestern phosphate mining region of Gafsa, where two people have been killed. One was shot dead by security forces and the other was electrocuted inside a local electric generator.

Ben Gharbia’s partial list of blogs that have been blocked by the Tunisian government includes 21 sites and links are available to most of them. In addition to this, the popular video sharing sites YouTube and DailyMotion are not accessible from Tunisia and email is filtered, especially on popular webmail sites such as GMail and Yahoo. Often Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) is implemented to filter the messages themselves, according to the article. Resistance to censorship has also taken advantage of the internet to raise awareness of the difficulties faces by Tunisian activists and to circumvent censorship altogether. Techniques have ranged from banner campaigns to the use of web 2.0 tools to coordinate and publicize campaigns.

In the case of Facebook, however, the use of this tool may have led to the blocking of the site just before Ben Gharbia’s posting.

On the social networking websites, Facebook, several groups protesting online censorship in Tunisia have been created.The most important one has so far gathered more than 620 members. Other groups have been created requesting the ATI (The Tunisian Internet Agency, which oversees Web distribution in the country) not to block Facebeook, which, unfortunately, seems to be blocked since yesterday by at least two of the country’s largest ISPs (Globalnet and PlaNet), as reported by several Tunisian bloggers and Facebook groups who were faced yesterday with the famous Tunisian 404 block page that states that the requested Web site could not be found.

Ben Gharbia was born in Tunisia but fled in 1998. How now resides in the Netherlands and is advocacy director for Global Voices, a non-profit global citizens’ media project founded at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, a research think-tank focused on the Internet’s impact on society. His personal blog, Fikra, generally deals with the role of New Media in political activism and the struggle against censorship. He is also the co-founder of nawaat, a Tunisian collective blog about news and politics.

Though Ben Gharbia’s article focuses on politics, a 2007 report by the Open Net Initiative fount that in addition to sites ctitical or the regime, protesting censorship or human rights violations, and calling for economic or social reform, Tunisia uses filtering software implemented at the national level to block out the following:

Pornographic sites and anonymizers and circumvention tools, such as Anonymizer (http://www.anonymizer.com/) and Guardster (http://www.guardster.com/), were filtered extensively. Indeed, almost all of the tested sites belonging to these categories were blocked.

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A few sites that criticize the Quran (http://www.thequran.com) and Islam (http://www.islameyat.com) or encouraging Muslims and others to convert to Christianity (http://www.biblicalchristianity.freeserve.co.uk/) were blocked, though their small number points to limited filtering of religious content in Tunisia.

Other blocked sites included several gay and lesbian information or dating pages, sites containing provocative attire, hacking Web sites, and several online translation services.

As is often alleged with filters for pornography in any context, there have been numerous claims that the filters also block access to legitimate information about topics such as women’s rights, medical issues, and even art based on the appearance of specific words in the site.

Filtering is hidden, generating page not found errors, rather than blocked access errors.

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