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The white iPhone with chipped paint that Moroccan journalist Omar Radi used to stay in contact with his sources also allowed his government to spy on him.They could read every email, text and website visited; listen to every phone call and watch every video conference; download calendar entries, monitor GPS coordinates, and even turn on the camera and microphone to see and hear where the phone was at any moment.

Forensic evidence gathered by Amnesty International on Radi’s phone shows that it was infected by “network injection,” a fully automated method where an attacker intercepts a cellular signal when it makes a request to visit a website. In milliseconds, the web browser is diverted to a malicious site and spyware code is downloaded that allows remote access to everything on the phone. The browser then redirects to the intended website and the user is none the wiser.

“The Moroccan authorities are buying every possible and imaginable surveillance and espionage product. They want to know everything.”

About half the political prisoners he met in jail told him police had tracked their communications and movements through their cell phones

Stockholm-based Ericsson AB, Creativity Software Ltd. of the U.K. and Dublin-based AdaptiveMobile Security Ltd. marketed or provided gear over the past two years that Iran’s law enforcement or state security agencies would have access to, according to more than 100 documents and interviews with more than two dozen technicians and managers who worked on the systems.

When Iranian security officers needed to locate a target one night in late 2009, one former Ericsson employee says he got an emergency call to come into the office to fix a glitch in an Ericsson positioning center.

Members of the collective see themselves as performing an essential storytelling role: providing coverage of police brutality and filling a media "vacuum". "There isn't a free media," founder member Omar Hamilton told me during a visit to the collective's workspace in Cairo. "We have to step in where we can to provide alternative narratives, to provide what we would see as the truth that's not being presented."

"There's nothing you can really do about it except run at the right time. Which is just after everyone else but not before it's too late,"

we needed a space to work out of and to host a library of revolutionary material and to archive everything we can, including mobile phone footage and news-quality material

and many residents of the five northern emirates -- the ones not named Abu Dhabi or Dubai -- often feel they've been left out of the sweepstakes.

. Political filtering of the Internet is nowhere near as comprehensive as, say, China, but both governments have the capacity to censor websites and occasionally use it. A recent petition for political reform, signed by 130 Emirati activists and scholars, was met with stony silence by the government and next to no coverage in the local press.

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there is no way the regime can stop information or footage, videos, and images from coming out," said Syrian activist Ausama Monajed

Monajed runs The Syrian Revolution News Round-up, a daily briefing on protests, clashes and killings using eyewitness accounts and leaked footage taken by mobile phones of protesters that is authenticated to the best of their ability.

Major news outlets have regularly aired amateur, grainy footage of rallies and killings, which activists sometimes have to smuggle across the border to neighbouring countries to disseminate, as part of their newscasts

Turkey's parliament on Thursday approved a tough pre-election law that could see reporters and social media users jailed for up to three years for spreading "fake news".

cement the government's already-firm grip on the media eight months before a general election that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan enters trailing in the polls.

The Council of Europe said the measure's vague definition of "disinformation" and accompanying threat of jail could have a "chilling effect and increased self-censorship, not least in view of the upcoming elections in June 2023".

the Iraqi National Communications and Media Commission shut down or gave warnings to 17 media institutions for covering the protests in Iraq. The offices of Al-Arabiya, Al-Hadath, Dijlah TV, Al-Rasheed TV, NRT, Al-Sharqiya TV, Al-Fallujah TV, Houna Baghdad and Al-Hurra were closed, while Al-Sumariya, Asia Network Television, Rudaw Media Network, Sky News Arabia and Ur Television were warned to change how they cover the demonstrations.

On Nov. 17, a mortar shell hit Iraq Art Co. in Karrada in the center of Baghdad.

Iraq Art Co. is a local production business that offers television services to several satellite channels such as the BBC, Al-Araby TV (owned by the Palestinian politician Azmi Bechara) and other channels. Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, which is affiliated with Al-Araby TV, said, “The missile was targeting the Al-Araby TV office in Baghdad.”

The presence of Republican Guards in the studios of state broadcasting headquarters on Wednesday, the day the army staged its takeover, was an early sign that state media would reprise their traditional role as loyal servants of a military-backed administration.

Within hours of commander-in-chief General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi broadcasting the announcement that Mursi had been removed and the constitution suspended, authorities shut down four private television stations controlled by Islamists.

Even before the takeover, Nile TV, one of two state channels, had begun airing video montages of triumphant soldiers performing their duties to the strains of patriotic music.

Egypt is a reminder not to be suckered into the narrative that a place is stable because it is static.

New technologies have lubricated the mechanisms of revolt. Facebook and Twitter make it easier for dissidents to network. Mobile phones mean that government brutality is more likely to end up on YouTube, raising the costs of repression.

Maybe the most critical technology — and this is tough for a scribbler like myself to admit — is television. It was Arab satellite television broadcasts like those of Al Jazeera that broke the government monopoly on information in Egypt. Too often, Americans scorn Al Jazeera (and its English service is on few cable systems), but it played a greater role in promoting democracy in the Arab world than anything the United States did.

Most international news organisations have no presence in the country (and, some say, a lack of interest in the protests). Media posted online by Tunisian web activists has been some of the only material that has slipped through the blackout, even if their videos and photos haven't generated quite the same enthusiastic coverage by Western media as the Iranian protest movement did in 2009.

Several sources Al Jazeera spoke with said that web activists had been receiving anonymous phone calls, warning them to delete critical posts on their Facebook pages or face the consequences.

Sami Ben Gharbia, who monitors Tunisia's web censorship for Global Voices, said that Google and Facebook were in no way complicit in the sophisticated phishing technique. The initial signs that something was underway came on Saturday, he said, when the secure https protocol became unavailable in Tunisia. This forced web users to use the non-secure http protocol. The government's internet team then appears to have gone phishing for individuals' usernames and passwords on services including Gmail, Facebook, Yahoo and Hotmail. Web activists and journalists alerted others of the alleged hacking by the government via Twitter, which is not susceptible to the same types of operations. "The goal, amongst others, is to delete the Facebook pages which these people administer," a Tunisian internet professional, who has also been in contact with Anonymous, told Al Jazeera in an emailed interview. The same source, who asked to remain unidentified due to the potential consequences for speaking out, said that in communication with the international group, he had come up with a Greasemonkey script for fireFox internet browsers that deactivated the government's malicious code.

"If you want to understand the emotive universe from which the Arab spring arose, cinema is a good place to start. Look at a film like Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention: there the director spits out an apricot pit at an Israeli tank and blows it up. The scene is both fantasy and prophecy."

I don't think the idea of Islamic cinema even exists in the west. Islam is presumed not to have a modern culture. I'd argue it's important that these films don't insist on any kind of stylistic unity – and that in nearly all of them Islam is portrayed as quite marginal. They argue against religiosity as a determining force. They're all about change, too, about modernity, which neocons like Francis Fukuyama say the Islamic world is incapable of

"If you want to be thought of as an auteur, you don't want to be categorised according to ethnicity or religion," Ahmad says. "By calling someone 'Islamic', you're meant to be taking away from their universal appeal."

The picture above advertises a popular Turkish soap opera – Harim Soltan (the Sultan's harem).  But there is also a satirical version (below) in which the Sultan's face has been replaced with that of Algeria's president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Besides "Sultan" Bouteflika himself, it shows a few members of the president's "harem", including his brother Said, prime minister Abdelmalek Sellal and Amar Saidani, secretary general of Algeria's ruling party, the FLN ...

On October 4 last year, Algerian activist Zoulikha Belarbi posted the Photoshopped picture on Facebook with a comment saying: "I don't know when the Bouteflika soap opera will end and he will wake up from his false dream which has become a nightmare threatening the future of Algeria and her people." On October 20, police raided her family home in Tlemcen, arrested her and seized her computer, mobile phone and SIM card. She was held for 24 hours before being released under judicial supervision. "I was treated like a terrorist," she said later. Her case finally came to court last weekend, and she was fined 100,000 dinars ($905) for "undermining the president of the republic". 

“The Arab media is trying to find its way after this 180-degree about turn,” said Nabil al-Khatib, editor-in-chief at Al Arabiya news channel. “Many journalists were used to receiving orders from information ministers in their countries on the coverage of events, and suddenly they found themselves free,” he told AFP.

Social networks that have given rise to so-called citizen journalism are a window with which to “mislead public opinion,” argued Amr Khafagi, editor-in-chief of the Egyptian Shorouk daily.

for Nakhle El Hage, Al Arabiya’s news director, “they can hold a treasure of information, (although) they are a land filled with mines.”