The Bravery of the Foolish

There is an interesting story from Reuters today (Reuters is owned by the Saudis) that talks about gays in Islamic countries in the middle east and Africa who are coming out online. In countries where Muslims are the majority, the penalty of being gay is death. Where Muslims are the minority, they will still try to kill the gays if they can. Check out the video below. Apologies for the music, you may just want to mute your speakers.

From the article here:

KHARTOUM (Reuters) – When Ali started blogging that he was Sudanese and gay, he did not realize he was joining a band of African and Middle Eastern gays and lesbians who, in the face of hostility and repression, have come out online.

Ali, who lists his home town as Khartoum but lives in Qatar, had plugged into a small, self-supporting network of people who have launched Web sites about their sexuality, while keeping their full identity secret. Caution is crucial – homosexual acts are illegal in most countries in Africa and the Middle East, with penalties ranging from long-term imprisonment to execution.

If they are blogging from within a Middle Eastern country such as Saudi Arabia or even Egypt, the government will be able to find them. Most Middle Eastern countries that are Muslim dominated enforce strict content filtering for their citizens. This means that all outbound web connections flow through a government controlled and operated internet gateway. Which means, that if the government wants to stop gay men from posting anything related to being gay, and even arrest them for illegal content, they can do so easily by tracing the IP address of the offender.

And Google, the owner of the Blogspot hosting site, has a corporate policy of cooperating with countries and their content enforcement police. They remove all images of the Tiananmen Square massacre for China and turn over security information on dissident bloggers there. Why not do the same upon request for gay bloggers?

Gays living in one of the countries where the lifestyle is illegal, should use protection online like an SSH tunnel through open proxies in foreign countries if possible. Otherwise coming out online will be deadly.