World day against Cyber censorship - 12 March 2012

Internet censorship In Morocco

It has been argued that Morocco is a liberal country where everything is possible and accessible; the Internet access for instance is one of the major authorities concerns. Morocco has blocked access to over dozens of critical websites to its policies and human rights violations. LiveJournal, Reporters without Border, are the highlighted blocked websites.

Censorship for Moroccan authorities run paralleled to their encouragement of the development of the media. Morocco has issues several judiciary decisions that encourage and legalize the sites blocking, however, one only can speculate about the real reason behind such act. The matter of the fact is Morocco first black list is all website that has Western Sahara TAG. Most websites are related to the POLISARIO, Western Sahara is kept top secrets. Saharawi’s in the Territory Occupied are monitored by the Moroccan Telecoms companies , as the online Social Networks complicated matter of authoritarian regimes such as the illegal occupation of Western Sahara they cannot offer to have a new uprising in the territory.

Furthermore, Morocco is taking a new approach by content filtering and removing, random internet and mobile phones shutdown, pressur on technical services providers such as Google Earth, Youtube, or any type of websites that can divert the blocking websites through Proxies; is in violation to Freedom of speech that this Organization “http://march12.rsf.org/en/”  si supposed to examine. Surpisingly they didNOT include morocco-Occupied territory on their report nor in their MAP of “TOP ENEMIES OF THE INTERNET”