A reported 27 of 65 Vietnamese cybercafe owners have been fined, as the Communist country gets moving with a crackdown on Internet porn and anti-regime content online which apparently began earlier this month.
Ho Chi Minh City’s department for culture and information, its department of science and technology, “and other relevant authorities of the city” launched a probe into the cybercafes, most of which were letting customers see Net porn, according to culture and information chief investigator Chau Quoc Dung.
The remaining 38 cybercafes remain under investigation and more fines were expected in those cases, said to have been discovered during a 15-day inspection tour by authorities in the former Saigon in late August and earlier September.
At least two million of Vietnam’s 81 million citizens are believed to go online regularly, according to press reports from the region, but most do it at cybercafes because home computers are rare in the country.
On the other hand, the Communist regime runs firewalls on several sites known to be critical of the government. And Reporters Without Borders, an advocacy group for freedom of the press around the world, has said seven Vietnamese dissidents are known to be in prison or detained otherwise in the country – two of which, the group said, were arrested in cybercafes while posting messages.
Last week, RWB stepped up its call for the release of one of the imprisoned cyberdissidents, Pham Hong Son, who is said to be suffering an inguinal hernia “that could prove fatal if not operated on,” and has received no treatment for the condition despite being moved to a prison far from his family’s home in Hanoi.
RWB called on the Netherlands, as the current European Council president, to push for Son’s freedom during October’s Asia-Europe Meeting. “We call on the Netherlands… to be firm on the issue of human rights in order to stress the fact that the ASEM summit is not just about economic cooperation,” RWB said in a formal statement.
Vietnam has established a new Ministry of Public Security taskforce to address what the government deems as cybercrime, porn and otherwise, even if the single-party, repressive regime’s limits on Internet users means cybercrime isn’t as common there as elsewhere.
