Blogging for a Future Democracy: The Story of Anh Ba Sam

Story of Anh Ba Sam

Posted on July 14, 2014 by Rosemary D'Amour —

Guest post by Pham Doan Trang

On a late spring day in Hanoi, officers from the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security launched a sudden raid on the home and business of well-known blogger, Nguyen Huu Vinh, better known as Anh Ba Sam (Vietnamese for “Brother Gossiper”). Vinh and his assistant Nguyen Thi Minh Thuy were detained immediately.A sudden raid–and the “urgent arrest,” as the police put it– is a technique regularly practiced by the security forces in Vietnam in order to suppress political dissent. In Vinh’s case, they have achieved this–for now. Two of the websites that he was managing at the time, Chep Su Viet (Writing Viet History) and Dan Quyen (Citizens’ Rights), were shut down shortly after his arrest, which indicated that the police were able to gain control of the sites and their passwords.