The Freedom House published the internet freedom report on 2014. The Internet is becoming less and less free, year after year with governments worldwide voting more and more laws by increasing monitoring and censoring users.
In accordance with Freedom House New York, who published his fifth annual Internet Freedom Study on Friday, the leaks by Edward Snowden were probably damaging!
According to the authors, governments are no longer hiding their efforts to control the internet by enacting "rapidly new laws that legitimize existing ones to crack down on and criminalize online violations."
Freedom House reports that this is largely due to the leaks that came from Edward Snowden. "Some countries are using the revelations of widespread surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA) as a good excuse to increase their own possibilities surveillance, often with little or no oversight, and often targeting the opposition and human rights activists.”
The result of these new laws is legal follow-ups, before they were done in the background, bringing fundamental changes to the whole of the Internet, the report said.
"Growing restrictions nationwide are changing the nature of the global internet, transforming it from a global network to a fragmented mosaic, as rules and accessible content vary from country to country."
Worst countries for this year? Russia and Turkey, where the internet was becoming and continues to be much less free every year for the five years of the study.
According to Freedom House, “after Putin returned to the presidency in 2012, the government θέσπισε πάρα πολλούς νόμους για να εμποδίσει το επιγραμμικό περιεχόμενο, συμπεριλαμβανομένων των κρίσιμων μέσων μαζικής ενημέρωσης ή των μέσων της αντιπολίτευσης. Οι παραβάτες υπόκεινται σε ποινική δίωξη και σωματική βία για τις δραστηριότητες τους στο διαδίκτυο, ενώ η επιτήρηση από τον ICT δεν υπόκειται σε επαρκή δικαστική εποπτεία.”
Turkey is moving on the same trajectory. “The authorities shut down YouTube, the Twitter, and other platforms for months – even years. They aim to ban journalists and social media users from linking to criminal charges,” the report says.
As for the emerging threats, which the report predicts, it is detection and storage data and inside information from all countries that have the means, since it became clear that the NSA had been gathering whatever it could for several years.
"These costly measures could expose user data to local law enforcement."
At this point we should point out that the report was funded by Google, Yahoo, the US Department of State and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The report ranks 65 countries with scores ranging from 0 to 100. 0 represents the maximum freedom (fewer controls) and 100 the minimum freedom.
Iran took the top spot on the planet, scoring an impressive 89, closely followed by Syria and China with 88 and 87 respectively.
But what is the most free country? Iceland, obviously, with 6 points, followed by Estonia (which this week announced it would offer electronic citizenship) with 8 points. Greece's absence from the list is sensible.
