The Tunisian Internet Agency is chargeable for harming country-wide memory. Questions need to be replied and people accountable need to be held responsible. For a long time earlier than My True Care the revolution, the ruling regime in Tunisia ruled public space, monopolized the media, confiscated the voices of dissenters, and spent loads of attempts and cash to produce a media narrative in its preferred.
To accomplish that, the regime strived to blurring records, silencing voices, and deceptive global public opinion with the aid of promoting the fabricated photo of ‘The Tunisian Miracle’ at home and overseas. This picture offered Tunisia a country of regulation, rights, and establishments, where people enjoyed welfare. In fact, unemployment became rampant, and poverty became massive, and tyranny turned into stifling people.
To face this policy of systematic blackout, some younger Tunisians endeavored to interrupt the silence using creating new media that would divulge the guidelines of the oppressive country and highlight the gravity of human rights violations during the reign of General Ben Ali. In this context, e-blogging is regarded in Tunisia as a form of protest, making room without cost writing and a space for expression separate from the totalitarian kingdom.
Numerous pioneering blogs and other websites came into life and furnished an area where adverse evaluations were shared. This broke the media embargo imposed on the humans, bringing collectively human rights activists, alternate unionists, partisan and unbiased people. These blogs and websites published daring articles and sarcastic cartoons with specific content material.
Among the digital platforms that exposed the regime with their growing reputation and rich, vital content are the discussion board of the National Council for Liberties, TAKRIZ, Tunisia News, TUNeZINE, NAWAT, and others. These websites resisted despotism peacefully thru the net.
Sami Ben Gharbia, director of the Nawaat internet site, stated at some point of his testimony earlier than the Truth and Dignity Commission (March eleven, 2017) that “bloggers have taken a leading position in politicizing the Tunisian internet and constructing a counter-propaganda towards that of Ben Ali.”
They expressed political attention to a social truth wherein there has been injustice and violation of rights and freedoms while getting to know the use of digital technology to interrupt the monopoly of Ben Ali’s device of statistics.
In their battle, they took the moral obligation to shield the non-public data in their blog traffic. But it turned into via blogs that Ben Ali knew that humans have been aware of the corruption of his regime; he consequently took every possibility to block this running a blog phenomenon and abuse bloggers.
To tighten manage over the Internet, a specialized data center (the Tunisian Internet Agency) was hooked up to reveal the humans browsing these networks and to hint their guides, e-mails, and pages on social media.
The Agency blocked many websites is taken into consideration to be against the regime and created others to decorate the photograph of the oligarchy. The Foreign Communications Agency contributed to the financing of e-piracy projects and the recruitment of media defenders for the regime; it additionally furnished the presidential palace with everyday reviews on the activities of competition websites.
The surveillance businesses used a military of sensors and informers at the side of sophisticated and value-effective piracy programs consisting of Trojans, virus transmission technologies, and sorting content material to disrupt opposition blogs, delete their databases, and prevent customers from accessing them.
Restrictive laws were enacted to restrict freedom of navigation, digital publishing and save you get admission to information. Along with these measures, the regime tracked bloggers down, arrested, and tortured them as it feared the power of ‘the phrase’ and its position in elevating human beings’ awareness and enlightening them.
The lengthy list of these bloggers consists of Zouhair Yahyaoui, arrested and served a jail sentence due to TUNeZINE, an important and sarcastic web page. He died in 2005 after not absolutely recovering from his time in prison.
Mohamed Abbou becomes imprisoned for 3 years and 6 months for publishing articles on the Tunisia News internet site approximately human rights violations within u. S. A .. Judge Mokhtar Yahyaoui became brushed off due to a letter he addressed to Ben Ali in which he criticized the deterioration of the judiciary.
However, those repressive measures did not efficaciously silence the voices of bloggers who persevered to help the protest motion and transmit the photograph of the revolution to the arena. In the time of dictatorship, the blogger had a virtual intellectual and e-activist function to fulfill. Devoting their lives, time, and pen to shield the oppressed, and specifically the right of humans to assume, protest, write and put up.
In their writings, those bloggers have been recording the criminal acts of a police kingdom, which the regime strived hard to cover, decorate, or obscure. Sami Ben Gharbia stated he filed a grievance in opposition to the Tunisian Internet Agency (ITA), which’s accountable for harming national reminiscence over a length of ten years due to its piracy of many competition websites at domestic and overseas.
It is a crime punishable by regulation and opposite to Tunisia’s agreements in the discipline of informatics. It is simply genuine that the difficulty of the harassment of running a blog motion has no longer been fully studied and scrutinized but. It isn’t always recognized which events had been responsible for tracking down bloggers and harassing them at the time of the oppressive regime.
Who issued the blockading orders? Which parties hacked the protest websites, and how much public money did they receive to do so? What are the components of the Internet police? And how became the secret code decoded? Who followed the bloggers, placed their geographical region, and facilitated the political police’s right of entry?
All those questions remain unanswered.
All the ones worried about the Internet in Tunisia and overseas are looking ahead to the Truth and Dignity Commission, the Anti-corruption Authority, human rights activists, and in a position judicial our bodies to answer those pending questions.
