A netizen Abdul Malek was arrested by the
police yesterday purportedly for posting anti-YOG remarks on
Facebook.
Malek wrote on Facebook that he was questioned by the police
from Bedok Police Division on the charge of “inciting
violence and public disorder” under Section 267 Chapter
244 of the penal code. His laptop was also seized.
[Source: I hate YOG
Facebook]
The news was reported in page four of The New
Paper today.
In an email reply to Temasek Review, Mr Malek said he was
arrested over a particular comment he left on the
Facebook and was questioned over his involvement
with the “I hate YOG” Facebook and his political
affiliations:
“The official reason given was the particular comment, but they
did question about involvment in the FB group as well. Such as, why
did I start a Facebook page, what was my problem with the YOG, did
I join any political party, etc.
Fixating on the specific words is, in my opinion, very shallow
of them as they are not reading with understanding, although the
meaning is quite clear.
On a side note, the reporter did mention to me this morning that
the police are uncomfortable with the media inquiries about
this case. They do not want to be seen as “heavy-handed”.
This is because the charge is very subjective and the
police do not wish to look bad in the light of the criticisms of
the YOG.
If it is any use, I spotted an MDA note with “Secret”
marked across the top. It was a one-sentence message
starting with “Netter Malik Syasha Slengzz ….” (The rest was
covered by a file).”
Mr Malek had earlier posed several difficult questions about the
YOG to PAP MP and Young PAP Vice Chairman Mr Zaqy
Mohamad on his Facebook which he was unable to answer. Mr
Zaqy subsequently removed Mr Malek as a friend from his
Facebook.
According to unconfirmed tip-offs we received, a raid was
conducted yesterday which saw a dozen netizens being arrested in
connection with the involvement in the anti-YOG Facebook.
Started only two weeks ago, the Facebook has garnered more than
2,700 friends so far.
The founder of the Facebook Mr Edmund Khor has just clarified
that he was not called up for questioning by the police.
We would like to appeal to readers who are privy to or has
information pertaining to this incident to contact us with our
online submission form and provide more
information so that we can follow up on this incident. If you are
the person/s being arrested by the Police, we would like to hear
from you, please contact us.
The YOG have so far been nothing but an embaressment to the
ruling party and we are not at all surprised that drastic measures
are being taken to silence its critics to “save face”.This
incident goes to prove that the ruling party is willing to
resort to any and all means to achieve their agenda by abusing and
manupilating the law to invade the constitutional rights of free
speech and privacy of Singaporeans.
In view of the lack of information at press time, we would like
to urge all our readers to excercise caution and refrain from
posting on Fackbook which appears to be very willing to
provide confidential information (against their own Privacy
Policy) to the authorities on any lame grounds for investigation
purposes.
Unlike FackBook which keeps all their access logs for years (the
reason why Police can conveniently round anyone up), our site
is clustered on 3 different servers in 3 countries and rotated
weekly between 2 main servers (mirror) with the recent deactivated
server formatted and reinstalled to ensure that all visitor’s data
are removed. Additionally, all emails sent to us are stored on the
server and not locally which means that neither of our
correspondent has a copy of your email or information on his or her
desktop (pop3 disabled on all our servers). Simply put, we do not
keep visitor’s information on our servers for more than a
week.
We wish to once again assure our readers that we take your
privacy very seriously and will never under any
ciscumstances hand over your information to irrelevant
person/s including the authorities unless ordered by a
court of competant jurisdiction (ie: court with jurisdiction in the
country where our server is co-located).
Additionally, in view of the coming General Election and
depending on the amount of donations we received, we have plans to
offer a VPN account for all our readers (at 50% off market rate) if
budget allows.
Molina
--TR
