Vienna, 10/06/2014
The South East Europe Media Organisation (SEEMO) called on the Serbian police to investigate all cases of hacker-attacks in Serbia in the past weeks. Numerous information that blogs in Serbia have suffered DDoS and other hacker-attacks, are alarming. “We welcome the investigations started by Serbian police, but we are asking the state authorities and police to inform the public in detail about this hacker attacks”, Oliver Vujovic, SEEMO Secretary General said. “It is interesting, that hackers attacked those web and blogs that are critical about the government or published investigations like the Webpage of Pescanik”, Vujovic added. Pescanik.net published claims by assistant professor at the University of Nottingham Ugljesa Grusic, associate professor at the University of East London Branislav Radeljic and PhD candidate at the London School of Economics and Political Science Slobodan Tomic, that the doctorate dissertation of the Serbian Interior Minister Nebojsa Stefanovic is alleged plagiarism. “This is the most ridiculous thing I have ever read,” Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said after Pescanik.net published the article. Stefanovic has denied any wrongdoing in his PhD, received last year from a private University in Belgrade.
In a public letter a group of bloggers and the BlogOpen group in Serbia wrote: “We need your support, solidarity, and help to spread the word about endangered civil rights and free speech in Serbia. For the past few months the Serbian Internet — blogs, media and social networks — has suffered under apparent censorship, especially when it comes to material that is of great public interest”. “We fear that these are abridgements of right to free expression. As a result, we are experiencing the “chilling effect” and a palpable sense of self-censorship”, the group added.