IT experts allege government hacking

IT experts claim that two African countries have mastered a new way of muzzling the online media -- hacking dissident news sites.

At least two Web sites were recently victims of hacking in Mauritania, said Isselmou Ould Dellahy O Maloum, a telecom researcher from Mauritania.

The Web sites have been critical of the military junta led by General Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, who ousted the country's democratically elected president, Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdallahi, in an Aug. 6 coup.

The Sahara Media news agency, considered the first news site in Mauritania, was also disabled for one to two days, while anbaa was not only hacked, but its office in Nouakchott was vandalized and computers were stolen, said Maloum, who is the coordinator of the For Mauritania Web site, a lobby group.

The attacks occurred after the sites threatened to publish articles about various scandals involving politicians and high-ranking personalities in the country, Maloum said.

"There is a team hired by the junta to sabotage activities of the newspapers; we have contacted the authorities for explanations on the hackings, but they are not forthcoming," said Sidatt Mohammed, an IT specialist from Mauritania living in the U.S. "It is like in any other dictatorship -- muzzling the press."

Mohammed called the situation very dangerous for the press and for human rights. One of the sites published hard evidence of the corruption, and the site went offline for days, he added, noting that the junta must have been behind the site's failure.

In Tunisia, the independent electronic publication Tunisnews announced that its site was the target of hackers this month, but the administrators of the site succeeded in overcoming the attack. The hack rendered the site inaccessible for several days.

In October, the webzine Kalima was hacked and its content completely destroyed, while the site of opposition activist Moncef Marzouki was also hacked.

Ongoing acts of filtering and destruction of journalists' and human rights activists' e-mail have intensified over the past months, particularly targeting users of Yahoo mail, noted the Observatory for the Freedom of Press, Publishing and Creation in Tunisia (OLPEC).

"Blogs have also been censored," said Sihem Bensedrine, OLPEC secretary general.

These acts of Internet piracy in Tunisia coincide with the prime minister's call for the consolidation of control and censorship of the Internet in the name of "protecting the democratic process, political stability and the fight against terrorism," OLPEC stated.

Efforts to contact the Mauritanian and Tunisian governments for responses were fruitless.