The family life was disturbed abruptly this summer, when the two were called in by the local unit of the GDBOP – an abbreviation in Bulgarian for the Chief Directorate for Combat against Organised Crime. GDBOP is one of Bulgaria’s special service agencies, which inherited the notorious communist State Security after 1990.

Eoin was the first to take up the invitation and appear at the police station - without a lawyer or translator - just to learn that he had been identified as the author of a bomb-threat. The threat, sent in February from a Russian server and signed by a non-existing environmental group, was popularised by mass media. It warned that in retaliation for the environmental damages in Bansko, planned explosions were ready to detonate and ignite a catastrophic avalanche over the ski centre.

Eventually, the police did not find any explosives but the operations in the resort were disrupted for a few hours, media reported. Active environmental organisations from the Save Pirin coalition, which had campaigned against the resort’s development, condemned the threat as a provocation. The interrogating officers urged McGrath to “admit”, because that would “make things easier”, the online daily MediaPool reported.

Neither Eoin, nor Fidanka McGrath admitted any involvement with the email threat during the two days. “The police were friendly, but we don’t know whether this was an interrogation technique or a speculation,” Fidanka told MediaPool.

The investigating police officer refused the media any comments. The incident sprang outrage among environmental campaigners, as it was the second in less then a month when authorities were putting pressure on activists for allegedly illegal online activities. “Internet communications were involved again by the repressive organs [of the state] in order to prove how easy it is to organise a terrorist act in Bulgaria,” wrote Petko Kovachev – a colleague of Fidanka McGrath at CEE Bankwatch, and founder of the Green Policy Institute in Sofia.

The McGrath story looks like part of a true investigation, on a true illegal matter. This could not have been said on a previous occasion, just a month earlier.

Criminalisation of green bloggers in Bulgaria

Michel Bouzgounov was called in by GDBOP and advised in a similarly “friendly” way to refrain from covering environmental protests in his blog. Street protests against the brutal over-construction of the Black Sea coast, had reached their peak in July, after the Supreme Administrative Court in Sofia removed the protected status of the country’s largest natural park Strandja.

The court’s ruling greenlighted yet another major coastal hotel project. After the “friendly” chat, the blogger had to sign an official warning that he would “refrain from quoting other sources of information in his personal blog - when possible violation of law is involved, namely, organising of unpermitted civil protests”.

No copy of the protocol was handed to him. Bouzgounov described the event in his blog: “Yes, I wrote about Strandja. Because I care whether tomorrow this park will be there or not! No, I did not call for riots, illegal action, violence or anarchy!”

But he vowed not to remain silent that a special service, supposedly dealing with organised crime, has found the time, agents, and the money to “investigate bloggers, free people, writing about Bulgaria’s nature, reporting on future and past protests in its defense”.

The intervention of the police against bloggers, expressing opinion or posting information about the environment is completely unacceptable, said Dan McQuillan - the coordinator of Amnesty International’s Irrepressible.info internet rights campaign.

“Authorities cannot clamp down on things written by bloggers, simply because they are inconvenient,” he affirmed. Lawyers from the Access to Information Programme in Sofia backed his opinion. Publishing of information in the internet, including blogging, is a form in which the right to freedom of expression is exercised, guaranteed by the European Human Rights Convention and by the Bulgarian Constitution, the organisation stated.

Bulgaria has not been the first in the region to exercise pressure against online environmentalism.

Romanian environmentalists watched online, visited offline

On March 12, 2004 the Romanian campaigner Eugen David was called for interrogation by Romania's General Police Inspectorate (GPI) for almost two hours. David is the president of Alburnus Maior – a non-profit group carrying out a campaign against a gold extraction project in the Rosia Montana region.

The activist claimed that the project would involve the involuntary resettlement of over 2000 people and destroy unique archaeological and natural sites. The police action was caused by the posting online of a report, describing the impacts of the project over archeological sites in the nearby Cirnic mountain. A complaint filed by the report’s author for infringing author's rights was the reason that got the GPI to start preliminary investigation leading to a penal procedure.

According to an Alburnus Maior press release the inception of the questioning did not clarify David's statute or role within the procedure. Throughout the meeting Eugen David was not given access to the complaint; but instead was read random excerpts by the GPI Commissioner.

The report “Ancient Gold Mines of Dacia –Rosia Montana District” written by Beatrice Cauuet, a scholar at the University of Toulouse in France, was the first proof of valuable archeological findings in the potential gold mining site, explained Stefanie Roth – a campaigner at Alburnus Maior.

Roth, who received the Goldman Environmental prize for her campaigning work in Rosia Montana since 2002, was outraged by the action of the police. “They were looking for one guilty person; playing the good cop and bad cop; trying to single out who posted the report on line”, Roth told. But the activists maintained their version – that the campaign had more than a thousand volunteers from all over the world and anyone of them could have posted it. A final ruling by the court that the publishing of the report served public interest, brought a happy end to the case, Roth recalled.

Fake campaigners and e-moles in Hungary

In Hungary, campaigners against the construction of a NATO radar installation on the Mount Zengo experienced a softer but more deceitful touch at the hand of authorities back in 2004.

Fake news items were filed in the Hungarian Indymedia – the independent online outlet of citizen journalists.

A contributor to the portal presenting himself as a local citizen from Zengo kept submitting articles in favour of the controversial radar construction project, said Fidusz, the Indymedia editor at the time.

After checking the internet protocol address of the sender, Fiduz realised the articles were sent from the servers of the Security Investment Department of the Ministry of Defence – the proponent of the NATO radar locator project. The case was publicised and did not affect the campaign, which finally lead to the relocation of the radar from Zengo, Fidusz recalled.

While a mole has been a most popular nickname for undercover police informers in latest history, cyberage has created its own prototype. Internet moles, or paid contributors to civil society online discussion forums have become very common, said Laszlo Perneczky - Pepe, a long-serving environmental activist from Hungary.

E-moles are anonymous contributors propagating certain political or business interests. They participate in almost every public online forum, just using their nicknames; we sometimes even know who they are in real life and who pays their salaries, but there is nothing we can do – it is all legal, and this is the nature of the internet, Pepe commented.

Expansion of copyrights

The aggressive expansion of copyright and intellectual property rights pose another major threat on internet freedoms, especially in the field of environment, commented McQuillan.

Corporations have already responded aggressively to the use of their logos in online campaigns, although happily, robust defences by organisations such as Greenpeace have been resisting.

Websites can be subject to take-downs through legislation such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act - a form of legalised harassment and disruption of campaign websites, he warned.

 “I am not surprised to see examples of pressure against bloggers in Central and Eastern Europe,” added McQuillan, explaining that the freedom of the internet, just like the freedom of the press and all other freedoms we – probably wrongly - take for granted. It will go through a long struggled before it gets established. “If we do not constantly defend it, we shall have less and less freedom of internet expression,” McQuillan warned.

International media and activists notice

The threats on online activism did not remain unnoticed by the international Internet rights community. Already in 2004, the Romanian e-network Strawberry Net, which hosted <www.rosiamontana.org>, alerted the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) - the global civil society network supporting the use of information technologies for social change.

APC has maintained a fast response network for moving content under threat across national borders. In Bulgaria, APC’s member BlueLink.net launched a campaign in support of the freedom of internet expression at <freenet.bluelink.net>. As a network of environmental NGOs, BlueLink has been hosting and providing online support to some of the major environmental campaigns since 1998, including Save Pirin. Both Bozgounov and McGrath happen to be the present and the former web managers of BlueLink.

“The FreeNet campaign demonstrates the intersection between the online freedom of speech/internet rights dimension, and the protection of the environment and citizen's rights to public participation,” commented APC’s Executive Director, Anriette Esterhuysen.

Since 2005, APC has launched an initiative to analyse and promote the Aarhus convention globally, as well as other instruments that bridge the policy gap between Information Society and Environmental Sustainability, said Esterhuysen.

McQuillan has also identified a deeper imperative arising from the nature of the information society, which is the fact that the internet itself is becoming an actor in many thematic fields of activism, including the environment. An example for that is the Aarhus Convention and the Pollutant Relase and Transfer Registers, which require the posting of environmental information online.