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draft laws currently being prepared by various ministries about the right to information and free circulation of information. As a society, we have come a long way on this subject since the 1960s; Military Intelligence (which today we refer to as “sovereign entities”) has loosened its grip on the media, and we have made huge progress in media freedom after the emergence of independent newspapers and satellite channels, blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Nonetheless, the security mentality still controls much of freedom of publication, and I believe we need to launch a serious dialogue about the relationship between national security on the one hand and freedom of opinion and free circulation of information on the other.

Information is vital for the democratic process; if the people don’t know what’s happening and if the actions of government officials and public figures are concealed and secret, then the citizenry would not be able to participate in events in their society.

Availability of information also allows the citizenry to oversee state agencies, and thus effectively contribute to curbing corruption and abuse of power. This makes free information flow vital to raising the efficiency of the government apparatus and improving its performance

This note will briefly outline the notion of an Arab “variety of capitalism” characterized by the central role of a distributive state whose interventions lead to a deep, and at least in parts unintended, segmentation of business and labour markets into insiders and outsiders. It will explain how this model has led to economic stagnation and contributed to the uprisings of 2011 as well as how it has hobbled economic adjustment after the uprisings, both under anciens and new regimes. Its pessimistic conclusion is that distributional institutions in most Arab countries remain very sticky, having created powerful vested interests not only in business but also in society at large that undermine the negotiation of a new “social contract” – a concept that many are talking about but no one seems to be able to map out in any detail.

Authoritarian-populist republics like Algeria, Egypt, (pre-war) Syria and Tunisia have achieved particularly good human development scores considering their modest levels of wealth (figure 3).

While Arab governments’ ambition to provide might have led to solid coverage of basic services, most Arab states have pledged much wider material guarantees to their citizens – typically beyond their fiscal and administrative capacity, especially once economic growth started stalling in the 1970s. The result has been a rigid insider-outsider division in which some benefit from Arab governments’ relative generosity while others remain excluded.

A prolific writer, Heikal penned dozens of books, chronicling events as a witness to history, his legacy linked with his association with Nasser. He was not just a journalist, newspaper editor, and later historian. Heikal was Nasser’s emissary with Western diplomats, a champion of Nasser’s brand of socialism and pan-Arab nationalism. He composed his speeches and ghost wrote Nasser’s political manifesto, The Philosophy of the Revolution. As the president’s alter ego, Heikal’s writings were read for clues to Nasser’s thinking. His influence derived from his proximity to power.

Heikal blurred the line between the role of a journalist and that of a politician. “He introduced a model in Egypt and the Arab world about what your ambitions should be as a journalist. In the West or Europe, you gain your reputation from your independence as a journalist,” explained Dawoud. “When I am the president’s consultant and I attend his close meetings and I write his speeches, there is definitely a lot of information that I would have to keep secret. That goes contrary to my job as a journalist, which is to find as much information as I can.”

The state media wholeheartedly embraced socialism and pan-Arabism, becoming a filter of information and propaganda, instead of the promised transformation of the institution into one that supposedly guides the public and builds society. Critical voices were muted, the military junta was sacrosanct, and Nasser was fortified as a national hero. The failings of the regime were not attributed to the president, but to the reactionary and destructive forces of capitalism and feudalism. Nasser’s personal confidant Muhammad Hassanein Heikal was appointed chairman of the board of al-Ahram, then later of Dar al-Hilal and Akhbar al-Youm publishing houses.

Since the revolution began in 2011, women have not only participated in nationwide protests but have also shaped events as politicians, ministers, and civil society activists. As the next elections approach, however, those who wish to ensure full female participation say that they worry in particular about rural women, who often don't possess the necessary identification documents or live far away from registration offices

many Tunisians are overwhelmed by the sudden profusion of information about voting and elections. "Too much information kills the essential information," she said.

"We shouldn't panic about the low number," said Tunisian activist and artist Leila Toubel. "We're encountering the same problem as in 2011." Back then, she said, 48 percent of eligible Tunisians chose not to vote. Since then, hundreds of thousands of more young Tunisians have reached the voting age of 18, joining the ranks of eligible voters. "The problem is that they need to become aware enough of their responsibility to vote," said Toubel. She criticized the authorities for scheduling registration during the summer, when Tunisian university students are finishing their exams and most of the population is observing Ramadan. She also noted that government voter awareness campaigns, based on celebrity spokespeople, have proven ineffective. "There was never a clear strategy," she added. But she disagreed with the assertion that women and men face differing access to information, saying that the problems are broader: "Tunisians are too emotional. It almost feels like everyone is still numb, or still unwilling to confront our problems."

young Africans struggling with unemployment, the difficulty of finding sustainable livelihoods, and the absence of civil liberties

Political instability, bad governance, and failed neo-liberal social and economic policies have exacerbated longstanding societal problems and diminished young people’s ability to support themselves and their families

Many are unable to attain the prerequisites of full adulthood and take their place as fully-fledged members of society. The recent wave of youth protests can best be understood in the context of this generation’s struggles for economic, social, and political emancipation

Many Tunisians do not share Lassaad’s confidence in the country’s recent record-keeping. Rumors have circulated widely since the revolution that the Interior Ministry archives have been strategically cleaned and those of the ATCE, the ministry charged with targeting propaganda to foreign media, simply destroyed.

Jallab confirmed that much of the archives of the ATCE were indeed largely destroyed shortly after the revolution. Additionally, the files of certain municipalities and local police bureaus, as well as most regional branches of the RCD, Ben Ali’s ruling party, have also disappeared

there is indeed still interference by government officials in the work of archivists at Tunisian ministries

the generals ruling Egypt since President Hosni Mubarak's overthrow were annoyed at his outspoken criticism of how they manage the media.

Egypt's January revolution has smashed the fear barrier that once forced journalists to temper their coverage of state affairs and avoid criticism of the head of state. The most outspoken were ostracized, fired and occasionally imprisoned.

The army has sent instructions to editors telling them to "refrain from publishing any items -- stories, news, announcements, complaints, advertisements, pictures -- pertaining to the Armed Forces or to commanders of the armed forces without first referring to the Morale Affairs Department and the Department of Military Intelligence and Information Gathering."

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is launching Tracker-19 to monitor and evaluate the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on journalism and to offer recommendations on how to defend the right to information.

Called “Tracker 19” in reference not only to Covid-19 but also article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this project aims to evaluate the pandemic’s impacts on journalism. It will document state censorship and deliberate disinformation, and their impact on the right to reliable news and information. It will also make recommendations on how to defend journalism.

without journalism, humankind could not address any of the major global challenges, including the climate crisis, biodiversity loss, discrimination against women and corruption.

“They just want to see your visa,” a British embassy official told me on March 18, passing on a message from Egyptian security officials at the country’s visa and immigration office. I knew what that meant: Other journalists had been called to the same authority to have their visas revoked. Later that day, the British official called me again as I sheltered in a hotel room, after a lawyer advised me to flee my apartment in case it was raided by police. The security services had spoken to the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which had passed a second message to the British embassy. “They’re asking you to leave,”

I dodged the meeting at the visa authority by sending a lawyer in my place, after officials at the German embassy in Cairo—I’m a dual national—warned me I could be arrested or deported there. We think it’s best you get on a plane, they said. 

I’d reported for the Guardian that Egypt likely had more coronavirus infections than the country’s official total

It is a Friday morning in Egypt's City of the Dead, the day of the week when families usually visit cemeteries to remember their deceased loved ones. But these days there are barely any visitors in the vast Cairo cemetery, which stretches over four miles and where tens of thousands of people have been living and working among the tombs for decades.

"We used to get money and food from people who visit the cemeteries. But now as everyone is afraid there are almost no visits,"

About 40% of Egypt's total workforce of 30 million people works in the informal sector, according to Egypt's manpower ministry, but groups such as the International Labour Organization (ILO) say the number is closer to 60%.

Social media narratives are appealing because they allow us to create our own feel-good stories about revolution

This social media ‘revolution’ was really about how the west experienced events in Egypt

Traditional media works differently: commenters tell you what to think by repeating their droning analyses hourly on 24-hour news channels. Their well-staged shots provide an overview of the scene and their description of events pretends to be ‘objective’ and comprehensive. In short, there is little room for engagement with information which is dictated to you and which is placed firmly within a specific context.

as Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues convincingly in his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2009), the costs of such powerful collective memory are often higher than we assume.

"Total recall" renders context, time, and distance irrelevant. Something that happened 40 years ago—whether youthful or scholarly indiscretion—still matters and can come back to harm us as if it had happened yesterday.

an important "third wave" of work about the digital environment. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, we saw books like Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital (Knopf, 1995) and Howard Rhein-gold's The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Addison-Wesley, 1993) and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Perseus, 2002), which idealistically described the transformative powers of digital networks. Then we saw shallow blowback, exemplified by Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon, 2008).

The tacit contract that has defined the North African country since its independence in 1956 is the ‘bread’ provision - mostly subsidies - in return for political deference. With modest resources, Tunisia has historically funded subsidies of strategic commodities - bread, sugar, tea, coffee, kerosene - and education, health, housing in some cases, and even recreational activities, such as sport. The National Solidarity Fund and the National Employment Fund, still under centralised control, have had some successes. They have partly shifted the burden of providence from the state to society. Tunisians dug into their pockets to volunteer what little of their non-disposable income they have to the cause of poverty alleviation, and improvements of the so-called ‘shadow zones’ (bidon-villes), the misery belt suffocating the rich towns and suburbs. But even this system of quid pro quo bread and political deference has failed many Tunisians, leaving many hopeless and jobless.

The state is a control-freak to the point that it disallows the existence of any hint of an informal economy. There is one in Italy - even in America - but not in Tunisia. If the state is partly failing in its provision of jobs, then it is unwise to ban informal trade and work. A youth empowered by education but disempowered by marginalization can be the spark that ignites social upheaval and social tension. In Tunisia, marginalization is today being translated into irrational and tragic suicides.

the notion of ‘total state’ and ‘total politics’ may not be apt for successful social engineering and re-distribution. Total control can translate into loss of control.

Western-produced surveillance technology sold to one authoritarian government became an investigative tool of choice to gather information about political dissidents -- and silence them

“The technology is becoming very sophisticated, and the only thing limiting it is how deeply governments want to snoop into lives,” says Rob Faris, research director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Surveillance is typically a state secret, and we only get bits and pieces that leak out.” Some industry insiders now say their own products have become dangerous in the hands of regimes where law enforcement crosses the line to repression.

Across the Middle East in recent years, sales teams at Siemens, Nokia Siemens, Munich-based Trovicor and other companies have worked their connections among spy masters, police chiefs and military officers to provide country after country with monitoring gear, industry executives say. Their story is a window into a secretive world of surveillance businesses that is transforming the political and social fabric of countries from North Africa to the Persian Gulf. Monitoring centers, as the systems are called, are sold around the globe by these companies and their competitors, such as Israel-based Nice Systems Ltd. (NICE), and Verint Systems Inc. (VRNT), headquartered in Melville, New York. They form the heart of so- called lawful interception surveillance systems. The equipment is marketed largely to law enforcement agencies tracking terrorists and other criminals. The toolbox allows more than the interception of phone calls, e-mails, text messages and Voice Over Internet Protocol calls such as those made using Skype. Some products can also secretly activate laptop webcams or microphones on mobile devices. They can change the contents of written communications in mid-transmission, use voice recognition to scan phone networks, and pinpoint people’s locations through their mobile phones. The monitoring systems can scan communications for key words or recognize voices and then feed the data and recordings to operators at government agencies.

A friend of Mohamed’s, an unemployed telecommunications engineer named Nabil Selliti, left Douar Hicher to fight in Syria. Oussama Romdhani, who edits the Arab Weekly in Tunis, told me that in the Arab world the most likely radicals are people in technical or scientific fields who lack the kind of humanities education that fosters critical thought. Before Selliti left, Mohamed asked him why he was going off to fight. Selliti replied, “I can’t build anything in this country. But the Islamic State gives us the chance to create, to build bombs, to use technology.” In July, 2013, Selliti blew himself up in a suicide bombing in Iraq.

Tourism, one of Tunisia’s major industries, dropped by nearly fifty per cent after June 26th last year, when, on a beach near the resort town of Sousse, a twenty-three-year-old student and break-dancing enthusiast pulled an automatic weapon out of his umbrella and began shooting foreigners; he spared Tunisian workers, who tried to stop him. The terrorist, who had trained at an Islamic State camp in Libya, killed thirty-eight people, thirty of them British tourists, before being shot dead by police.

“The youth are lost,” Kamal told me. “There’s no justice.” Douar Hicher, he said, “is the key to Tunisia.” He continued, “If you want to stop terrorism, then bring good schools, bring transportation—because the roads are terrible—and bring jobs for young people, so that Douar Hicher becomes like the parts of Tunisia where you Westerners come to have fun.”

The system of plastic recycling in Tunisian cities is largely reliant on an informal workforce of waste pickers, known as barbechas, meaning someone who searches, digs or investigates

Many waste pickers live in poverty, selling the waste they find to middlemen recyclers who then sell it on for a marked-up price to the national waste collection system or, more often, a private recycling factory.

a proposed law to establish a "social and solidarity economy" which would support collectives and self-governed businesses that both make a profit and have a social objective

As governments around the world struggle to stave the spread of the disease they are understandably harnessing the power of technology. We must ensure this is done with respect for human rights and civil liberties and that we don’t weave a surveillance apparatus that can’t be undone.

These technologies are being deployed quickly and, it appears, without human rights impact assessments, sufficient privacy controls, or adequate restrictions on their use outside of the current context.

there’s an dearth of information about who has access to the data, how long it can be maintained, what sort of privacy rights people in the databases have, what types of restrictions are in place to ensure the data is only used as intended to combat the spread of the virus, and what could be done with the technology afterwards. If there is one thing we know from technological solutions, once a capacity is built it can be used for many purposes beyond that for which it was intended.