Internet rights fight
Threats to online activism have not gone unnoticed by the international internet rights community. In 2004 Romanian e-network Strawberry Net, which hosted , alerted the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), a global civil society network supporting the use of information technologies for social change. The APC maintains a rapid response network for moving threatened content across national borders. In Bulgaria, APC member BlueLink.net launched a campaign in support of the freedom of internet expression at . As a network of environmental NGOs, BlueLink has hosted and provided online support to major environmental campaigns since 1998, including Save Pirin. Incidentally, both Bozgounov and McGrath happen to be the present and former web managers of BlueLink.
The FreeNet campaign demonstrates how the dimensions of online freedom, environmental protection and public participation overlap, said APC Executive Director Anriette Esterhuysen. Since 2005 APC has launched an initiative for analysis and global promotion of Aarhus principles and other instruments that bridge the policy gap between the information society and environmental sustainability, she continued. McQuillan has also identified a deeper imperative of the information society, which is the fact that the internet itself is becoming an actor in many thematic fields of activism, including environmental missions.
