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.
The founder of the Facebook Mr Edmund Khor has just clarified that he was not called up for questioning by the police.
Started only two weeks ago, the Facebook has garnered more than 2,700 friends so far.
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”. If this incident is found indeed to be true, then it 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 grounds.
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. 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.(CB, must be trying to make money by instilling fear into people).
