The autumn 2016 Index on Censorship magazine explores anonymity through a range of in-depth features, interviews and illustrations from around the world. Contributors include former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson, journalist John Lloyd, Bangladeshi blogger Ananya Azad and philosopher Julian Baggini. This issue also has a thoughtful essay by novelist Hilary Mantel and illustrations by Molly Crabapple.
After the brutal murders of other writers in his country, Ananya Azad moved to Germany when he began to receive death threats.
In this extract from Index on Censorship’s Autumn issue, Mark Frary looks at some of the tactics you can use to remain safe and invisible when browsing
Just before my last trip to Chechnya in mid-September my colleagues at Novaya Gazeta began to receive threats and were told to pass on the message that I shouldn’t go to Chechnya any more. If I did, my life would be in danger. As always, our paper has its ‘own people’ on the general staff and the ministry of defence — people who broadly share our views
Writing in the latest Index on Censorship magazine, fellow Russian journalist Andrey Arkhangelsky reflects on Anna Politkovskaya’s legacy
Ahead of the anniversary of her murder, Index has compiled a reading list of articles written for the magazine both by Politkovskaya and about her
Foreign correspondents often rely on “fixers” to help them report from war-torn countries. But, as Caroline Lees reveals in the new issue of Index on Censorship magazine, they can be targeted as spies if their names become known locally.
In their latest task the Index on Censorship youth advisory board look at anonymous art around the world
Why does it matter? Why don’t we just ban it or make it illegal if it can be used for all these harmful purposes?
A quarterly journal set up in 1972, Index on Censorship magazine has published oppressed writers and refused to be silenced across hundreds of issues.
The brainchild of the poet Stephen Spender, and translator Michael Scammell, the magazine’s very first issue included a never-before-published poem, written while serving a sentence in a labour camp, by the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who went on to win a Nobel prize later that year.
The magazine continued to be a thorn in the side of Soviet censors, but its scope was far wider. From the beginning, Index declared its mission to stand up for free expression as a fundamental human right for people everywhere – it was particularly vocal in its coverage of the oppressive military regimes of southern Europe and Latin America but was also clear that freedom of expression was not only a problem in faraway dictatorships. The winter 1979 issue, for example, reported on a controversy in the United States in which the Public Broadcasting Service had heavily edited a documentary about racism in Britain and then gone to court attempting to prevent screenings of the original version. Learn more.
