Kyrgyzstan government hijacks newspaper websites
Apparently the government in Kyrgyzstan has hijacked opposition newspapers sites and are now pointing their URL to government friendly news sites.
It is still a mystery what is going on in Kyrgyzstan. The newspapers in the country are nearly all government controlled or friendly towards the government in such a way that they can not be trusted when covering the ongoing dispute between the opposition and the newly elected government.
The situation gets more blurred by the lack of foreign correspondents and public access to the Internet in Kyrgyzstan. This means no bloggers or eyewitness.
Looking in to this I found this press release written by the project Open Net Initiative in partnership Eurasian i-Policy Network
Kyrgyz Websites subject to unexplained failure and hacking during the Parliamentary Elections
Websites belonging to political parties, independent media and government information agencies were subject to unexplained technical failures and deliberate hacking during Kyrgyzstan’s recent Parliamentary elections. Researchers from the Open Net Initiative documented a pattern of failures that suggest a deliberate attempt to interfere with the functioning of the Internet during election period.
Attacks included flooding journalist e-mail accounts with large amounts of spam, and spoofing of e-mail from Kyrgyz websites located in the US. Several political websites were deliberately defaced.
It seems like the suspected online war is continuing. Some newspapers websites are completely down and some have closed their English language section.
The weirdest thing is that the only English speaking independent newspaper in Kyrgyzstan, WWW.GAZETA.KG, now is being redirected to http://www.internews.kg - The government controlled news agency that by the way has closed down its English section!!!
Nice that we have a google cached version of www.gazeta.kg. Link.
In the cached version that dates back to march 18. the editor writes:
…many American and European Internet users received two malicious spam messages spoofed from www.gazeta.kg and www.kyrgyz.us. Needless to state that their purpose was to discredit our good name and get our web-sites closed.
According to the rating system www.top.kg of Asianinfo, ISP provider in Kyrgyzstan, our web-sites rank first and second most visited in Kyrgyzstan. This fact obviously does not give peace of mind to the political PR advisors, hired by Akaev’s regimen, who keep creating “wonders†in the attempts to disrupt the activities of the oppositional and non-governmental organizations.
This was the last english words from Gazeta.kg before the site got hijacked. This must be the worst (first?) case of government hijacking of websites.
See newspaperindex´ selection of newspapers from Kyrgyzstan
Update
Nart from citizenlab.org writes:
The websites www.gazeta.kg, www.kyrgyz.us, www.ar-namys.org were all hosted on Everyones Internet, Inc. in Houston Texas are were reportedly defaced on several occasions and were subjected to Denial of Service attacks, as were several other opposition newspapers. However, it is not accurate to say that the government hijacked these sites. The government may be suspected in the involvement in these attacks but it is not true that gazeta.kg was hijacked by the government and internews.kg in not a government site.
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Report: Kyrgyzstan government hijacking news websites
Boing Boing reader and journalist Hans Henrik in Denmark says, I published a disturbing story on my blog today about the ongoing online war between the government and the opposition in Kyrgyzstan. Apparently the new government in Kyrgyzstan are hijacki…
Trackback by Boing Boing — March 24, 2005 @ 4:10 am
How come that all of a sudden the western world is so much interested in post-Soviet developments? Ukraine, Kyrgyz-something. Complaints about lack of information must be translated to “Hey, governments, give us press-releases and footage with exotic violence and blood to resell to our customers, who’re already bored with Iraq.” Whited sepulchres.
Comment by Come on, what's to you in KZ? — March 24, 2005 @ 1:27 pm
Here’s another good source:
http://www.monitoring.kg/index_eng.html
Comment by Nart — March 24, 2005 @ 8:57 pm
Internews.kg’s english section:
http://www.internews.kg/index.php?newlang=eng
Comment by Nart — March 24, 2005 @ 9:00 pm
Far out from this conversation, just wanted to add that you have very little place to be writing about media if you don’t know what Internews is . . . do your research if you don’t want to look incompetent.
Comment by Thomas — May 27, 2007 @ 11:39 pm