While el-Baghdadi was careful not to focus his criticism on the UAE, he says he was deported due to his online outspokenness against repression and leadership in the region, specifically the government of Egypt, whose military-led overthrow of former President Mohamed Morsi and subsequent violent crackdown was applauded by the UAE.
The repression of online journalism is intensifying in China, Vietnam, Burma and Iran, says Clothilde Le Coz of Reporters Without Borders, a group that defends journalists.
So while it's important to continue documenting the direct repression of online journalists and bloggers, as organizations like Reporters Without Borders are doing, it is important to remember that there are other ways to qualify as an "enemy of the Internet".
"Sentencing someone to a year in a labor camp, without trial, for simply repeating another person's clearly satirical observation on Twitter demonstrates the level of China's repression of online expression," Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International's director for the Asia-Pacific region, said in a statement on Thursday.
Denying them the opportunity to do so successfully will require the United States and other to articulate, publicly and consistently, the critical distinction between the restrictions placed on online speech by democracies and the repression favored by many autocracies.
The crackdown comes as the Guardian launches an online database that catalogues the extent of repression by the Iranian authorities.
The Tunisian Internet Authority now something of a defender of online freedom, after having been a key tool of repression for the deposed former president—is still fighting a court ruling last year ordering it to censor the web for pornography.
Given the Internet's role in helping democratic activists the world over break through government repression, we must be vigilant in protecting free speech online.
These functional results are consistent with repression of genes involved in fatty acid metabolism by MeCP2 (Online Figure VIIE).
