The terrorists have won, so says Anna at Sepia Mutiny.

In the wake of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, the Indian government issued a directive to internet service providers to start blocking sites hosted by Google’s Blogger service, TypePad and Geocities. The alleged reason for the block: terrorists have been using the internet to communicate.
We shudder at the thought that India’s intelligence services will eventually discover that terrorists also use telephones, national postal services and pencils.
UltraBrown offers the following comment:

As the world’s back office, for India to blame overzealous techies would hardly be credible. It’s not yet clear which blogs the government was targeting, but banning all of Blogspot is nothing less than outright repression — mimicking the tactics Pakistan used to shut down discussion of Danish cartoons critical of Islam. India is now in the august company of some of the world’s least free nations

Amit Varma, who just penned a piece for the Guardian on how collaborative blogs such as Mumbai Help can be put to use in a crisis ponders: ” Won’t it be ironic if, after all that Mumbai Help attempted to do last week, residents of Mumbai aren’t even able to access it?”

Much, much more at DesiPundit, Global Voices and .

While India is following the route of authoritarian China in blocking blog hosting services, curiously neither country has banned . Although concerns abound about online sexual predators using the service, we must assume the youth-oriented service is free from terrorists, pro-democracy dissidents and Falun Gong practitioners.

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