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changed. “Before [young people] used them only for entertainment,” he said of social
media sites like Facebook. “Later, when we had big social events, like land-grabbing, so-
cial issues, violence, protests, people started talking about this. Gradually they changed
from using [it] for entertainment to using it for social issues.”
Though the Cambodian web remains relatively unshackled, the government has
warned that “crimes” committed online will be subject to similar penalties to those com-
mitted elsewhere. One of the first cases tried under the new Penal Code was that of
Seng Kunnakar, a logistics officer with the World Food Programme, who was arrested in
December 2010 after printing out and sharing materials from “KI-Media”—an anti-gov-
ernment news blog. Kunnakar was arrested on a Friday; on Sunday, the municipal court
convened and after a brief trial sentenced him to six months' jail. The charge: “incite-
ment.”
The following month some Cambodian web users began noticing that the popular blog-
spot.com domain, which hosted KI-Media and other political blogs, was inaccessible.
Other antigovernment sites, including that of Ung Bun Heang, the late Khmer-Australian
political cartoonist whose creations poured invective on the CPP and the Vietnamese, also
seemed to have dropped offline. In February the foreign-language press published leaked
emails from an official in the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications ordering leading
ISPs to block the domains. Minister So Khun denied any formal policy of censorship, but
told the
Cambodia Daily
that ISPs had the right to block pages that insulted “government
lifted the restrictions.
The government is currently readying a new “cyber law,” expected to be passed in the
latter half of 2014, a draft of which proposed outlawing any online communication that
slandered government agencies or affected the country's “political cohesiveness.” One
official said the cyber bill would prevent “ill-willed people or bad mood people from
500-meter radius of schools—a decree that, if fully implemented (so far it hasn't been),
would result in the closure of most of Phnom Penh's internet cafés. Then, early in 2013,
a schoolteacher was summoned for questioning after he accused traffic police of corrup-
tion on Facebook. The Cambodian web remains small, but internet and social media use
is only likely to spread further as Cambodia develops and technology becomes more af-
fordable. Whether the CPP's time-honored system of control will be able to migrate to
the diffuse world of the internet remains to be seen.
On September 25, 2013, Cambodia's Supreme Court released Born Samnang and Sok
Sam Oeun, the men convicted of killing Chea Vichea. It had been nearly a decade since
their arrest, around half of which the men had spent in prison, jailed for a crime they
