Tamilnet.com accessible once more in Sri Lanka via SLT ADSL

ICTs in general 1 Minute

Tamilnet.com, the controversial pro-LTTE site blocked by all ISPs in Sri Lanka since mid-2007, is accessible once more from SLT ADSL connections. Even when it was blocked, many in Sri Lanka accessed the site content from via proxy, with Groundviews being one of the first to post such a workaround.

Just as in March 2009, Tamilnet.com remains blocked on Dialog’s WiMax connections, but is bizarrely freely accessible on my Blackberry Bold via 3G on Dialog. Conversely, whereas Tamil Canadian, a website with a similar bias to Tamilnet, is freely accessible on Dialog, it is completely blocked on SLT ADSL. As noted in my post in March last year, Tamilnet’s blocking on SLT has on occasion disappeared, only to be quickly reinstated. It is unclear if this current window of free access is a technical glitch or whether the person at Sri Lanka Telecom responsible for maintaining the block will now be tied to a tree or hung from it.

Web censorship in Sri Lanka is, to date, arbitrary in nature and execution. A leitmotif of all the sites blocked or disrupted to date is that they feature content rather unpalatable to the incumbent government. This aside, there is no discernible method to the madness in violence directed against web media, or the blocking of sites. What’s also ironical is that (pornography) websites blocked by court order are more accessible than sites blocked without any legal authority.

For more details of web censorship in Sri Lanka, read Threats and opportunities: The freedom of expression online in Sri Lanka, a new report by the Centre for Policy Alternatives that is a comprehensive study of threats to freedom of expression online in Sri Lanka today.

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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