Belarus and Russia are “electronic police” states

The hacker company Cryptohippie made an attempt to summarize all available information from different countries about mass electronic surveillance technologies, the use of SORM-like systems, cases of prosecution of citizens for their Internet activity (these are indirect evidence that such surveillance is ongoing), the level of cryptography, tracking financial transactions and the general state of Internet censorship. They collected information from 17 sources (including from organizations such as “Reporters Without Borders”, the Information Center for Electronic Privacy, etc.) and compiled the first of its kind composite rating of the most “electronic-police states." Here is the final report ( PDF ) as well as the raw data table ( XLS ).

It is expected that the first two places in the table took North Korea and China. Further on the “honorary” list are Belarus and Russia, and Russia - according to the results of a real assessment by 17 parameters, and Belarus - simply because of its reputation, there is not even an open statistic for it, as well as for North Korea. Interestingly, these countries are followed by quite “democratic” Great Britain, USA, Singapore, Israel, France and Israel. It turns out that they are also beginning to practice close surveillance of their citizens via the Internet.

Relatively free countries that are marked in green on the map, very few remain in the world - these are Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, Thailand, Bulgaria and Romania.

via Slashdot