Tamilnet accessible from Sri Lanka once again

ICTs in general 1 Minute

Tamilnet, blocked by the Government and all major commercial ISPs in Sri Lanka earlier this year, is now accessible through SLT’s ADSL (Broadband) connections (last checked 19th December 2007, 6:30PM local time).

The website was the first in Sri Lanka to be blocked, with the Government openly stating that it was searching for hackers to bring it down. Article XIX’s statement on the ban clearly pointed to the negative fallout of what was a ill-informed decision:

ARTICLE 19 views this move as a clear breach of the right to freedom of expression. We are particularly concerned that this may signal a move by the government to add Internet censorship to its already considerable control over the media. We also note that attempting to curtail access to alternative views can only perpetuate the conflict and undermine efforts at conflict resolution.

Though the site was accessible through web proxy and other means, the decision to unblock it seems as arbitrary as the decision to close off access to it in the first place.

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

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  1. Pingback: Tamilnet accessible once more from Sri Lanka? « ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace)

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