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The country's decision to block the Uzbek-language wiki may be more about showmanship and nationalism than controlling information.

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Uzbekistan's ban on Wikipedia is censorship as performance art. The ban, enacted late last month, blocks all articles written in Uzbek while leaving articles in other languages accessible. Unlike earlier acts of online censorship, the ban on Uzbek Wikipedia articles does not prevent citizens from accessing political information. On the contrary, it blocks a prime venue of innocuous diversion: the thousands of articles about pop stars, national heroes, and sports figures that comprise the Uzbek-language Wikipedia. Uzbeks unable to access the Uzbek-language Wikipedia may now turn instead to the Russian-language Wikipedia, a virtual treasure trove of Uzbekistan's state-suppressed memories that could not possibly merit official approval. So why block the Uzbek version? What does it accomplish?

Like its English-language counterpart, the Uzbek Wikipedia is an idiosyncratic collection that represents the diverse interests of its users. The best entries, as rated by moderators, are Cristiano Ronaldo, the Republic of Korea, Philosophy, and Alisher Navoi (a 15th century Uzbek poet). Other user favorites include Kelly Clarkson, Nirvana (the band), Internet Explorer, and a Finnish symphonic metal group called Nightwish. Pop culture entries tend to skew toward foreign tastes: the recently updated Uitni Hyuston entry, for example, is longer than that of popular Uzbek singer Yulduz Usmonova. Though the Uzbek government can be capricious in its censorship, the Uzbek Wikipedia is assiduously unprovocative - indeed, Uzbeks writing about national hero Navoi is exactly the sort of thing that the state encourages. Skimming the list of 7,890 entries, I found more of the same apolitical fare: an epic piece on FIFA; a treatise on plov.

What is missing from the Uzbek Wikipedia? Information on contemporary political life. President Karimov has a short, perfunctory entry, and all opposition figures and parties are absent. The chronology of the autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan, a source of domestic tension for decades, terminates in 1991. The Uzbek entry for Andijon, the site of the brutal state crackdown on civilian protest in 2005, contains two lines detailing its geographic location and its founding as a city in 1297. Contrast this with the entry on Andijon in the Russian Wikipedia - not banned in Uzbekistan -  a long, contentious account that notes the deaths of innocent citizens and their subsequent labeling as "criminals" by the Karimov regime.

I have a suspicion that what prompted the Wikipedia ban at the end of the January was the addition, on January 24, of the following entries: "seks", "penis", "gey", and "jinsiy aloqa" (sexual relations), which come complete with helpful illustrations. This would be in keeping with the government's aversion to overt sexual content, which they believe threatens national values. (Note that this is simply a theory - I have no inside knowledge as to the reason for the ban, nor has the Uzbek government addressed it. ) But that still leaves the question of why the Russian or English Wikipedias remain open to the public when they contain even more sexual imagery and political content.

Here it is useful to look not only at what is being censored, but where - because the question of "where" content exists online is more complex for regimes that derive their power from narrow definitions of nationalism. Uzbekistan's ban on Wikipedia has less to do with blocking access to information than it does with territorializing an ambiguous Uzbek ethnolinguistic virtual space. As I argued in a 2010 article, the Uzbek government views the Internet as a virtual extension of its sovereign dominion, and sees Uzbek-language content as subject to its jurisdiction. Under this logic, state intervention is  more justified when Uzbeks write encyclopedia entries in Uzbek than it is when Uzbeks read encyclopedia entries in Russian, because those entries do not lie on the state's ethnically demarcated virtual "territory". (That said, I see censorship of the Russian version in Uzbekistan's future.)

Censorship in authoritarian states is not purely practical - it is an act of showmanship, and in this case, one-upmanship over a foreign threat. Large, foreign platforms challenge the Karimov regime not only through the interaction they facilitate, but through their ambiguous territorial standing. Last summer, Uzbekistan's state officials responded to Facebook by creating Muloqot, a state-run social media network which only Uzbeks in Uzbekistan can use. By censoring the Uzbek-language Wikipedia, state authorities mark a similarly ambiguous collaborative space as Uzbekistan state territory -- territory subject online, as it is on the ground, to strict government control.

This post originally appeared at Registan.net and is reproduced with permission

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Censorship as Performance Art: Uzbekistan's Bizarre Wikipedia Ban

Freelancers, bloggers and citizen journalists like those reporting in the Middle East have few resources to defend themselves against censorship and attacks, the CPJ said. Authoritarian states are buying communications surveillance equipment from Western manufacturers and using it to monitor and target journalists and bloggers, the group said.

The report cited people in Syria who smuggled video footage to reporters across the world and were consequently tracked and tortured by government authorities after their Facebook accounts were hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army, a government-sponsored hacking group.

The New York-based group said the number of deaths while covering dangerous assignments, such as street protests, reached the highest level since 1992. Most of the deaths were in the Middle East and North Africa, where 19 journalists died last year, most while covering the Arab world uprisings.

One third of those killed were freelance journalists, more than double the proportion that freelancers have constituted over the years.

Nine online journalists were killed for their work, including Mexican reporter Maria Elizabeth Macias Castro, whose decapitated body was found with a note saying she had been killed for reporting news on social media websites. Her death was the ?rst documented by CPJ that was directly tied to journalism published on social media.

The committee found that 179 journalists were imprisoned as of Dec. 1, an increase driven by widespread imprisonment across the Middle East and North Africa. About half of those work primarily online, the committee said.

The highest number of jailed journalists was in Iran, where 42 reporters were behind bars.

While the Internet and social media has helped democratize the dissemination of information, the nature of such newsgathering leaves journalists especially vulnerable to censorship and retaliation, the CPJ said in its annual survey. There are few legal mechanisms to fight censorship on an international level, the group said.

The CPJ said governments, the business community and human rights organizations must urge intergovernmental groups to create a legal framework to adjudicate press freedom cases at the international level.

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Barney Rosset, the renegade founder of Grove Press who fought groundbreaking legal battles against censorship and introduced American readers to such provocative writers as Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet, died Tuesday in New York City. He was 89.

His daughter, Tansey Rosset, said he died after undergoing surgery to replace a heart valve.

In 1951 Rosset bought tiny Grove Press, named after the Greenwich Village street where it was located, and turned it into one of the most influential publishing companies of its time. It championed the writings of a political and literary vanguard that included Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Tom Stoppard, Octavio Paz, Marguerite Duras, Che Guevara and Malcolm X.

Rosset was best known for taking on American censorship laws in the late 1950s and 1960s, when he successfully battled to print unexpurgated versions of D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover" and Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer," both of which were considered far outside the mainstream of American taste but went on to become classics.

In 1959, he published "Lady Chatterley's Lover," which had been banned by the postmaster general for promoting "indecent and lascivious thoughts," but in 1960 a federal appeals court found that its frank descriptions of sexual intercourse did not violate anti-pornography laws.

In 1961, Rosset published "Tropic of Cancer," which was blocked by more than 60 court cases in 21 states. In a landmark 1964 ruling, however, the U.S. Supreme Court held that it had "redeeming social value" and was thus not obscene.

Rosset "was one of the good guys, in effect doing in book publishing what Playboy was doing in magazines," Playboy founder Hugh Hefner said Wednesday. "He was breaking the boundaries and published some very important works."

While running Grove Press, Rosset also founded a seminal literary magazine, Evergreen Review, which published important early works by such writers as Susan Sontag and Edward Albee.

He later branched into film distribution, with his major success the risque Swedish art film "I Am Curious (Yellow)," released in this country in 1968. Although considered mild by today's standards, the movie, with its scenes of nudity and sexual intercourse, provoked court challenges and feminist ire. But it made millions of dollars for Grove and burnished Rosset's standing as a countercultural impresario.

"Grove Press and Evergreen were a central part of that cultural revolution of the '60s, and Barney was at the center of it," said Morgan Entrekin, president of Grove/Atlantic, the company formed by the merger of Grove and Atlantic Monthly Press in 1993. "He used to gleefully tell me stories about the FBI files they had on him. He took a joy in standing up to the establishment."

Rosset's autobiography, which may be published later this year, is titled "The Subject Was Left-Handed," a line from a report he found in his FBI file.

The only child of a wealthy banker, Rosset was born in Chicago on May 28, 1922. "I'm half-Jewish and half-Irish and my mother and grandfather spoke Gaelic," he told the Associated Press in 1998. With that parentage, he once observed, "I was forced into tolerance" and held radical views from an early age. He attended Chicago's extremely progressive Francis W. Parker School, published a newspaper called Anti-Everything and joined the left-wing American Student Union.

He studied at four colleges, including Swarthmore and UCLA, eventually earning a degree from New York's New School for Social Research in 1952.

He was a freshman at Swarthmore in 1940 when he bought a banned copy of Miller's "Tropic of Cancer," which had been published in Paris in 1934. Rosset identified with Miller's sense of alienation.

"The sex didn't really hit me. What really got me," he told the Voice of America in 2009, "was the anti-American feeling that Miller had. He was not happy living in this country, and he was extremely endowed with the ability to say why."

After serving in the Army Signal Corps in China during World War II, he moved to New York with his first wife, painter Joan Mitchell, who introduced him to the Greenwich Village art scene. A friend of hers told him about a small press on Grove Street that was for sale. He bought it for $3,000.

He wanted to publish "Tropic of Cancer" but instead began with books that wouldn't require jumping through legal hoops. His first success was Beckett's absurdist play "Waiting for Godot" in 1954. He bought it for a $150 advance against a 2.5% royalty and sold more than 1 million copies at $1 each. (It has now sold more than 2.5 million copies.) Rosset named one of his sons after Beckett, who became one of his closest friends.

The year he published "Godot," Rosset heard from UC Berkeley literature professor Mark Schorer, who urged him to put out an uncensored edition of "Lady Chatterley's Lover." Rosset wasn't enamored of the book, but thought it could pave the way for the much bolder "Tropic," Miller's semi-autobiographical account of his early life and sexual adventures in Paris. Rosset notified postal authorities that he was sending the book in the mail. It was immediately confiscated, setting in motion the protracted legal tussle that ended in 1959 with the book's publication.

He then went to work on Miller, who was loath to allow Rosset to publish "Tropic." According to Rosset, the author feared what success would do to the book. "He wrote me a letter in which he said…What happens if you publish it and we actually win the case?" Rosset recounted in a 1997 interview with the Paris Review. Miller said he didn't want it to become so acceptable that it was assigned in colleges "and no one will want to read it!"

Miller's fear was unfounded. "Tropic" became a classic, along with many other titles Rosset published. He printed Burroughs' "Naked Lunch" in 1962, and Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg were among the defense witnesses at that book's trial. A few years later, Rosset snatched up "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" (1965) after Doubleday, fearful of repercussions after Malcolm's assassination, dropped it.

Rosset did not agree with the "socially redeeming" argument that led to the landmark victory for "Tropic" in 1964.

"My grounds has always been that anything should be — can be — published," he told NPR in 1991. "I think that if you have freedom of speech, you have freedom of speech."

His attempt to expand Grove into the film distribution business took the company to the brink of ruin. Rosset sold it in 1985 to oil heiress Ann Getty and British publisher George Weidenfeld, who ousted him as Grove's chief the following year. Rosset found himself starting over at 63 and launched other publishing ventures that eventually ran aground.

He revived Evergreen Review as an online journal and continued to run it until shortly before his death.

Married several times, he is survived by his wife, Astrid Myers, four children, three stepchildren, four grandchildren and four step-grandchildren.

elaine.woo@latimes.com

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Barney Rosset dies at 89; publisher fought censorship

NEW YORK — A global coalition against censorship is needed to protect online journalists and bloggers who are being targeted by repressive governments, a leading advocacy group said Tuesday.

At least 46 journalists died around the world in 2011, the Committee to Protect Journalists said, an increase from the estimate it released in December. Seven journalists were killed in Pakistan, where 29 journalists have been killed in the past five years.

Freelancers, bloggers and citizen journalists like those reporting in the Middle East have few resources to defend themselves against censorship and attacks, the CPJ said. Authoritarian states are buying communications surveillance equipment from Western manufacturers and using it to monitor and target journalists and bloggers, the group said.

The report cited people in Syria who smuggled video footage to reporters across the world and were consequently tracked and tortured by government authorities after their Facebook accounts were hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army, a government-sponsored hacking group.

The New York-based group said the number of deaths while covering dangerous assignments, such as street protests, reached the highest level since 1992. Most of the deaths were in the Middle East and North Africa, where 19 journalists died last year, most while covering the Arab world uprisings.

One third of those killed were freelance journalists, more than double the proportion that freelancers have constituted over the years.

Nine online journalists were killed for their work, including Mexican reporter Maria Elizabeth Macías Castro, whose decapitated body was found with a note saying she had been killed for reporting news on social media websites. Her death was the ?rst documented by CPJ that was directly tied to journalism published on social media.

Report: These tech companies sell spy tools to dictators

The committee found that 179 journalists were imprisoned as of Dec. 1, an increase driven by widespread imprisonment across the Middle East and North Africa. About half of those work primarily online, the committee said.

The highest number of jailed journalists was in Iran, where 42 reporters were behind bars.

While the Internet and social media has helped democratize the dissemination of information, the nature of such newsgathering leaves journalists especially vulnerable to censorship and retaliation, the CPJ said in its annual survey. There are few legal mechanisms to fight censorship on an international level, the group said.

The CPJ said governments, the business community and human rights organizations must urge intergovernmental groups to create a legal framework to adjudicate press freedom cases at the international level.

In 2010, CPJ hired its first Internet advocacy coordinator to act as a liaison between Silicon Valley and the journalists who depend on their products — "not only to get the news out, but also to protect them and their sources from physical harm," the report said.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Online journalists censored, attacked: report

Tunisia's court of cassation on Wednesday threw out a ruling banning pornographic websites, a judicial source and a press freedom watchdog said.

"The court quashed the first instance and appeals ruling that ordered the censorship of pornographic websites," the judicial source told AFP on condition of anonymity.

The source added the case would go back to an appeals court.

"This is rather good news," said Olivia Gre, whose organisation Reporters Without Borders had warned against returning to the censorship that prevailed in pre-revolution Tunisia, under the ousted regime of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali.

"I respect the court's decision but I think the judiciary has shirked the issue. We will use the same arguments to win this case in the appeals court," lawyer Monaem Turki, one of the plaintiffs, said.

He had said earlier this month that pornographic websites offended Muslim values and should be accessible from Tunisia.

"In France, Hitler apologist websites are censored. Likewise, in Tunisia, there should also be prohibitions and pornographic sites are not tolerable," Turki said.

But rights groups and the internet agency (ATI) itself, which was already ordered twice to filter porn sites, have spoken out against censorship.

"It's a step backwards," ATI's chief executive Moez ChakChouk had said. "Under Ben Ali, the ATI was an instrument of political control and censorship. Today we are fighting for the neutrality of the Internet, but they want to put the old cloak back on us."

He also said filtering would compromise the quality and speed of data transfers, and that his agency did not have sufficient funds to carry out such censorship anyway.

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Tunisia court throws out porn websites ban