Blogging is not a crime, but…

There is an interesting post on TechCrunch about the increasing number of bloggers who had being arrested throughout the years, from 2004 till 2007. Looking at the graph above, taken from Swivle, the trend is going up.

One may think that this sort of thing only happen in countries with oppressive governments such as Egypt, China, Saudi Arabia and Iran. However, if you take a look at the uploaded spreadsheet, you’ll see there are bloggers arrested in countries such as Canada, France, Greece and even the U.S.

Blogging is not a crime, but that doesn’t mean that bloggers are not criminals. Although most of the time these bloggers are being arrested due to publishing blog posts on sensitive political issues, but some of them were arrested due to alleged terrorism or pedophilia (child pornography). These are clearly against the law.

So next time when your local blogger is being arrested, it’s better for you to find out what the blogger is being arrested for, before you go all gung ho weaving the rights-to-free-speech flag around and saying that the government is trying to silence bloggers.

Our local blogosphere, the Malaysian blogosphere had seen its fair share of bloggers being arrested or sued. I think the problem here is that sometime blog posts are not that clear whether its the blogger’s assumption or that its something they claim to be a fact.

I mean you could say that you strongly think or that you strongly believe that a certain politician orchestrated the murder of a certain foreign model in order to cover up some shady dealings of some military vessel, and published it on your blog. I don’t think you will get in trouble for that.

However to say that you know for a fact, and that you have undeniable proof that such thing did happen, and you published that on your blog, you better have the proof ready to back you up when they come knocking on your door.

The fact that some bloggers in Malaysia had been arrested by the ISA is a good thing. This means that our government is actually reading our blogs and they are taking blogs seriously.

Then again, one should never take the Interweb too seriously.

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