Hays Travelogue

There is nothing like living abroad to make you appreciate some of your basic American rights, messy and contentious as they sometimes are. For instance, freedom of speech. Turkey currently blocks access to hundreds of internet sites including WordPress, YouTube, and GeoCities. Last week, a judge blocked Blogger because of a complaint by Digiturk, a satellite television provider. The complaint and valid point by citizens is that entire domains are shut down because someone has a complaint about a few sites within that domain. Blogger is back up now, and there are proxy servers that provide roundabout access to other blocked sites.

Wikipedia has a concise summary of the laws that govern free speech in Turkey.

Global Voices has the reaction of Turkish bloggers to their banishment last week.

Internation Musing and The Istanbulian are two blogs that I like. Both sites have some interesting things to say about freedom of expression. Poke around within the blogs to find other topics.

Check out Radikal for some photos of last weekend’s protests.