In this week's #IMWeekly: Twitter frees up "blasphemous" tweets in Pakistan, an Internet shutdown in Iraq, and one of the largest DDoS attacks ever in Hong Kong.

Between Friday, June 13, and Wednesday, June 18, Hong Kong suffered two DDoS attacks aimed at pro-democracy sites. The targets—one, the site of civil society group “Occupy Central with Love and Peace”, the other newspaper Apple Daily—both seek to advocate for universal suffrage in Hong Kong.

Alexander Sodiqov, a Tajik-born PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Toronto, was recently detained by Tajikistan's State Committee for National Security (GKNB) when he traveled to Khorog, a remote town in a politically unstable region of the country. Sodiqov, the former Central Asia Editor for Global Voices, was in Khorog to conduct fieldwork for a project on the role of international actors, states, and civil society in Central Asian conflict management.

Iraq’s Ministry of Communication issued orders Sunday for a total Internet shutdown in five of the country’s western and central provinces, where violence from a Sunni insurgency led by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is particularly intense.

This comes two days after access to Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube as well as communication platforms like Skype, Whatsapp, and Viber was cut across the nation.

Internet Monitor is delighted to announce the publication of “Blogs as an Alternative Public Sphere: The Role of Blogs, Mainstream Media, and TV in Russia’s Media Ecology,” the third in a series of special reports that focus on key events and new developments in Internet controls and online activity.

In this week's #IMWeekly: NSA spying on online gamers, North Korea purges online content related to recently executed official, and more!

Internet Monitor is delighted to announce the publication of Internet Monitor 2013: Reflections on the Digital, our first-ever annual report.

In this week's #IMWeekly: new leaks reveal NSA collection of phone data even broader than previously thought, Iran arrests cyberactivists despite reform promises, Huawei to take its business elsewhere than US, and more!

In this week's #IMWeekly: South Africa enacts new law on Protection of Personal Information, Dutch authorities take issues with Google's privacy policy, and more!