Was I Censored by Israel?

RISHON LEZION, Israel — Yes­ter­day evening, I wrote a short post about cen­sor­ship in Israel. I said that any news reports that men­tion Israel’s alleged xxxxxxxxxxxxx must go through a mil­i­tary cen­sor and that the country’s Film Rat­ings Board has the power to cen­sor movies as well.

Today, I logged into Word­Press and saw: 1.) The text of the post had been deleted; and 2.) Com­ments on the post had been dis­abled. Obvi­ously, I did not do those actions.

So, I must won­der: What gives? I wrote about Israel in the same way that thou­sands of jour­nal­ists around the world do: I men­tioned the country’s “pur­ported” (or “alleged”) xxxxxxxxx. I did not say the coun­try has — or does not have — them because, frankly, I do not know, and Israel has never offi­cially said that they have xxxxxxxx. Besides, the exis­tence of the mil­i­tary cen­sor is com­mon knowl­edge here.

I assume that my prior post — which I have fixed — will be changed again. So I am writ­ing this as a tes­ti­mony and delet­ing the spe­cific words above that may have crossed the censor’s line. But the whole issue raises sev­eral inter­est­ing ques­tions involv­ing jour­nal­ism, the Inter­net, and national jur­si­dic­tion: Word­Press is an Amer­i­can com­pany whose cen­tral servers, I assume, are in the United States. But I am cur­rently writ­ing in this blog using Israel’s high-tech infra­struc­ture. So who has legal juris­dic­tion over my blog? And what role did Word­Press man­age­ment play in this whole deba­cle? I will send an e-mail to them soon. Updates to follow.

Update One: I sent this e-mail to Word­Press cus­tomer support:

Yes­ter­day, I wrote a post here:

http://samueljscott.com/2009/05/30/censorship/

The post briefly men­tioned the fact that any Israeli jour­nal­ists who report on Israel’s alleged xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx must have their reports passed by a mil­i­tary cen­sor. This is com­mon knowl­edge here.

Today, I saw that the text of the post had been deleted and com­ments had been dis­abled. So I restored an ear­lier ver­sion of the post.

I must ask Word­Press: What hap­pened? I have the fol­low­ing questions:

1.) Did Word­Press, by itself and with­out any out­side influ­ence, edit the post? If so, why?

2.) Did any offi­cial of the Israeli gov­ern­ment ask Word­Press to edit the post? If so, what was his cited justification?

3.) If an Israeli offi­cial did make such a request, why did Word­Press agree to it? If Word­Press had to adhere, what was the Amer­i­can and/or Israeli and/or inter­na­tional law under which Word­Press had to agree to the official’s request?

4.) I am also curi­ous: I am an American-Israeli blog­ger who is writ­ing from Israel on a blog­ging plat­form run by a U.S. com­pany and whose servers are pre­sum­ably located in the United States. Under whose legal juris­dic­tion does my blog fall?

Thank you for tak­ing the time to answer my questions.

Let’s see if they respond.

Update Two: I also sent the fol­low­ing e-mail to the English-language depart­ment of the Israeli Gov­ern­ment Press Office:

I am an Amer­i­can Israeli — and a for­mer Boston jour­nal­ist — who writes a blog on var­i­ous top­ics includ­ing Mid­dle East­ern issues.

Yes­ter­day, I wrote a post here:

http://samueljscott.com/2009/05/30/censorship/

The post briefly men­tioned the fact that any Israeli jour­nal­ists who report on Israel’s alleged xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx must have their reports passed by a mil­i­tary cen­sor. This is com­mon knowl­edge here. Today, I saw that the text of the post had been deleted and com­ments had been dis­abled. So I restored an ear­lier ver­sion of the post.

I have the fol­low­ing questions:

1.) Did the mil­i­tary cen­sor or any offi­cial of the Israeli gov­ern­ment ask Word­Press to edit the post? If so, what was his cited justification?

2.) I am also curi­ous: I am an American-Israeli blog­ger who is writ­ing from Israel on a blog­ging plat­form run by a U.S. com­pany and whose servers are pre­sum­ably located in the United States. Under whose legal juris­dic­tion does my blog fall?

Thank you for tak­ing the time to answer my questions.

Let’s see if they respond as well.

Update Three: Word­Press responded today:

1.) Did Word­Press, by itself and with­out any out­side influ­ence, edit the post? If so, why?

No, we would never do that.

2.) Did any offi­cial of the Israeli gov­ern­ment ask Word­Press to edit the post? If so, what was his cited justification?

No, we would never do that and to my knowl­edge no-one has asked.

3.) If an Israeli offi­cial did make such a request, why did Word­Press agree to it? If Word­Press had to adhere, what was the Amer­i­can and/or Israeli and/or inter­na­tional law under which Word­Press had to agree to the official’s request?

They didn’t, we didn’t, we wouldn’t.

4.) I am also curi­ous: I am an American-Israeli blog­ger who is
writ­ing from Israel on a blog­ging plat­form run by a U.S. com­pany and whose servers are pre­sum­ably located in the United States. Under whose legal juris­dic­tion does my blog fall?

US law, specif­i­cally Californian.

My advice is to change all your pass­words right now. Lit­er­ally now.

There is no way at all we would let any­thing like this hap­pen. We don’t run wordpress.com just to say nice things and we have some very con­tro­ver­sial blogs here. If some­one wanted your email address — name — any­thing else —  they would need to serve us with a court order.

My guess is your pass­word is com­pro­mised. Either way, cre­ate and use a very strong pass­word because that is the secu­rity weak point as with any system.

I just changed my pass­word, but I still won­der why any alleged hacker would make that sin­gle, small change to that one, sin­gle post. I am still skeptical.