This story is a couple of days old and I have been too lazy to write about it before. However, I figured I should as I have recently made a presentation relating to the recently enacted Information and Electronic Transactions Law (ITE Law).
The story is that there is an anonymous blogger in town and they are posting a comic strip of the Prophet Muhammad which has riled the sensibilities of many Muslims. What caught my attention was the headline in the Jakarta Post which reads "Govt to pressurize Wordpress into disclosing blogger's ID". I am not sure that pressurize is the right word for this sentence. I am guessing that it is like terrorizing using pressure to get a pressurize situation.
The language choices aside, there are just a couple of points that are worth making here.
If you think that you are anonymous then make sure that you are smart enough to know how to use the technology to make it so. The government is demanding that Wordpress reveal the identity of the blogger because the content of the offending blog is deemed to be a cyber crime. The threat is that if Wordpress does not disclose the blogger's identity then the National Police Force's Digital Forensic Lab is going to get involved and uncover the blogger's identity themselves.
It seems that there is still a fair amount of road to be travelled in terms of what constitutes free speech and freedom of expression, particularly in light of Article 27 of the new ITE Law.
