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AdaptiveMobile, backed by the investment arm of Intel Corp. (INTC), proposed a system in partnership with Ericsson for Iran’s largest mobile provider in 2010 that would filter, block and store cell phone text messages, according to two people familiar with the discussions. An Ericsson spokesman confirmed the proposal. The Irish company still services commercial gear for a similar system it sold in 2008 to Irancell. Police have access to the system, say two former Irancell managers.

Texting has become the predominant means of digital communications because more than 70 percent of Iranian households have a mobile phone -- four-times greater than the percentage with internet access.

Hundreds of people have been convicted by Iranian courts for offenses related to election protests, according to New York-based nonprofit group Human Rights Watch.

“My mobile phone was my enemy, my laptop was my enemy, my landline was my enemy,” says Shojaee, who turned to using pay phones.

Iran is one of many authoritarian countries across the Mideast and North Africa employing Western surveillance tools for political repression. In Bahrain, for instance, communications monitoring centers sold by Siemens AG (SIE), and maintained by Espoo, Finland-based Nokia Siemens Networks and then its divested unit, Trovicor GmbH, have been used to track and arrest activists, according to a Bloomberg News investigation.

Much of NSN’s gear in Iran has since been swapped out in favor of China’s Huawei Technologies Co.

A rapidly growing global business, the “lawful interception” and information intelligence market now generates more than $3 billion in annual sales

The 3.9 million-euro ($5.5 million) system AdaptiveMobile proposed could handle more than 10,000 messages per second and archive them for a period of 180 days, according to a company proposal. The archive would contain 54 terabytes of storage, according to the document. That’s big enough for all the data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope over 20 years.

“Ultimately, telecom is a force for good in society,”

Police arrested him on the outskirts of a rally that December, beating him with fists and a baton and jailing him for 52 days. Security agents interrogated him 14 times, presenting transcripts of text messages plus an elaborate diagram showing all the people he’d called -- and then everyone they’d called.

The system can record a person’s location every 15 seconds -- eight times more frequently than a similar system the company sold in Yemen, according to company documents. A tool called “geofences” triggers an alarm when two targets come in close proximity to each other. The system also stores the data and can generate reports of a person’s movements. A former Creativity Software manager said the Iran system was far more sophisticated than any other systems the company had sold in the Middle East.

“A lot of people were not happy they were working on a project in Iran,” he says. “They were worried about how the product was going to be used.” Gokaram says he worked only on commercial products and didn’t share those concerns. He declined to discuss specifics about any technology deployed in Iran. Creativity Software, which is privately-held and partly funded by London-based venture capital firm MMC Ventures, announced last November that it had made four sales in six months in the Middle East for law enforcement purposes without identifying the mobile operator clients. Saul Olivares, market development director at Creativity Software, declined to discuss sales of law enforcement technology, but in an e-mail he pointed to its practical benefits, such as locating individuals during disasters, for ambulance crews and in other emergencies.

The European Union took aim at Iran’s growing surveillance capabilities in October 2010, enacting new sanctions that include prohibitions for goods that can be used for “internal repression.” The regulations, however, focused mostly on low- tech items, such as vehicles equipped with water cannons and razor barbed wire. In September, the European Parliament broadened its surveillance concerns beyond Iran, voting for a block on exports of systems if the purchasing country uses the gear “in connection with a violation of human rights.”

After his arrest early last year, Pourheydar, the opposition journalist, says police accused him of speaking to foreign media such as BBC and Voice of America. Their evidence: unbroadcast mobile phone calls captured, recorded and transcribed, he says. They also had transcripts of his e-mails and text messages. He never learned which companies provided the technology that made it possible.

“All these companies, which sell telecommunications services and listening devices to Iran, directly have roles in keeping this regime in power,”

The Committee to Protect Journalists says there is clear proof that the phishing campaign is organised and co-ordinated by the Tunisian government, as did other sources that Al Jazeera spoke with.

In the siege against cyber dissidence, Twitter has been a bastion for activists. Because people can access Twitter via clients rather than going through the website itself, many Tunisians can still communicate online. The web-savvy use proxies to browse the other censored sites. Yet even if bloggers manage to maintain their blogging, the censorship deprives them of those readers who do not use proxies. The result is what Ben Gharbia described as the "killing" of the Tunisian blogosphere.  Ben Mhenni said that the government's biggest censorship of webpages en masse happened in April 2010, when more than 100 blogs were blocked, in addition to other websites. She said the hijackings that had taken place in the past week, however, marked the biggest government-organised hacking operation. Most of the pages that had been deleted in recent days were already censored. Amamy said the government's approach to the internet policy is invasive and all-controlling. "Here we don't really have internet, we have a national intranet," he said.

Visitors to Huffington's website last May could have seen  this page (preserved here by the Wayback Machine) which lists Narwani's articles. Look at the same page today and they have all been deleted except for one which she co-authored with someone else. It's as if the other articles never existed.

concern about Facebook's deletion of various pages connected with the Syrian opposition, possibly at the behest of pro-Assad elements. Some of them have been listed by Felim McMahon of Storyful and the blogger, Brown Moses. McMahon points out that some of these have helped Storyful to corroborate (or not) various claims about the Syrian conflict, while Brown Moses notes that "nearly every Facebook page" reporting on the chemical attacks in Damascus last August has now gone. Alongside the fighting on the ground, there's also a propaganda war being fought over Syria – mostly via the internet. At first sight this might seem like a sideshow but, as in all wars, it's an integral part of the conflict. One individual heavily involved in the Syrian propaganda war on the pro-Assad side, through Twitter and various websites, is Sharmine Narwani (who I have written about previously, here,  here, here, and here). Among other things, Narwani wrote a dozen highly contentious articles for Huffington Post, some of them about Syria. Whether you like them or agree with them is beside the point. Whatever their merits or de-merits, they were examples of the sort of arguments being used by Assad supporters and the fact that Huffington, a major American website, saw fit to publish them at the time is also interesting and relevant. 

I'm not suggesting that articles on the internet should never be deleted or changed but that it should not be done lightly, and when it does happen, publishers should be prepared to justify their decisions in public.

“It turns out that it is much more critical than they had imagined because the other international news sources are being dismantled.”

18-hour days for Ms. Hussaini, whose work is now followed closely on the site and on Twitter by journalists from traditional media organizations, including Andy Carvin of NPR, who has been regularly curating and publishing posts on Twitter, creating a news wire about the unrest in the region for weeks.

“The citizen media scene is small in Libya,” Ms. Hussaini said. “We find it very difficult to find voices here and in other places where there is a lot of censorship and a lot of fear from the regime. Bloggers being arrested is a fact of life in some countries.”

Global Voices Advocacy is run by Sami Ben Gharbia, a highly respected blogger who is a founder of Nawaat, a blog about Tunisia, and an activist who until recently lived in exile from Tunisia for 13 years.

“People are not always interested in knowing what is happening in Yemen,” he said. “We have been waiting for people to pay attention to this corner of the world for a long time, and now we are ready to tell their stories.”

“In the UAE, publicly declaring one’s animosity or lack of allegiance to the regime falls under the country’s broad definition of terrorism. Whereas in Saudi Arabia, the same applies to calling for atheist thought.”

Globally, internet freedom declined around the world for the fifth year running in 2015, with some governments changing tactics as Web users got better at by-passing state-run controls

More than 61 percent of Web users live in countries where criticising the government, military or ruling family is censored online, the report said. Another 58 per cent live in countries where people can be jailed for sharing political, social or religious content online

the off-network spread of Facebook’s identity graph is parasitic for the web

Facebook’s insistence that you have one identity across the web is both short-sighted and asinine, and people I talk to are starting to realize this.   Fact is, one social network will not rule the web... People are simply way too social to allow that.

We're treating virality as a good in and of itself, moving forward for the sake of moving

"Twitter's algorithm favors novelty over popularity."

there were too many tweets about WikiLeaks, and they were so constant that Twitter started treating WikiLeaks as the new normal

as we adopt new and better ways to help people communicate, can we keep asking what is really being communicated? And what's the opportunity cost of what is not being communicated while we're all locked in the perpetual present chasing whatever is trending?

"What it means to be social is if you want to talk to me, you have to listen to me as well." A lot of brands want to be social, but they don't want to listen, because much of what they're hearing is quite simply not to their liking, and, just as in relationships in the offline world, engaging with your customers or your readers in a transparent and authentic way is not all sweetness and light. So simply issuing a statement saying you're committed to listening isn't the same thing as listening.

Fetishizing "social" has become a major distraction, and we're clearly a country that loves to be distracted. Our job in the media is to use all the social tools at our disposal to tell the stories that matter -- as well as the stories that entertain -- and to keep reminding ourselves that the tools are not the story. When we become too obsessed with our closed, circular Twitter or Facebook ecosystem, we can easily forget that poverty is on the rise, or that downward mobility is trending upward, or that over 5 million people have been without a job for half a year or more, or that millions of homeowners are still underwater. And just as easily, we can ignore all the great instances of compassion, ingenuity, and innovation that are changing lives and communities.

conflates the form with the substance

new social tools can help us bear witness more powerfully or they can help us be distracted more obsessively

humans are really a herd animal and that is what we are doing on these social sites, Herding up

The cyber-repression was made easier by the physical structure of Tunisia’s data flow, which runs through just a few choke points. In broad terms, the system has two distinct parts: one for intercepting phone-related traffic and one for the Internet, Saadaoui says.

In each of the three telecom rooms, which are about half the size of a tennis court, a handful of computers known as “boxes” straddle the data pipelines, Chakchouk says. Their function is to siphon off communications, mostly by searching for key words, according to Saadaoui. “You get all the traffic going through these boxes,” Saadaoui says. Once the system flagged a suspect e-mail, a fiber optic network under the streets of Tunis carried it from the telecom offices to the Interior Ministry’s operator room, Saadaoui says. Moez Ben Mahmoud Hassen, a spokesman for Tunisie Telecom, said the company “denies any possible relation with such practices.” He stressed that it follows the law and respects the confidentiality of communications. Asked about the company’s activities during Ben Ali’s government, he said it was a matter for the courts and declined to elaborate. Communications through mobile operator Orascom Telecom Tunisie, also known as Tunisiana, were not monitored, according to a statement released by company spokeswoman Fatma Ben Hadj Ali. The country’s other mobile operator, Orange Tunisia, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

By 2010, it became a contest as Tunisians increasingly employed encryption the packet inspection couldn’t crack. Communications on Facebook boomed, and the regime demanded better tools, Saadaoui says. The same European contractor that provided e-mail surveillance signed a deal to add monitoring of social networks, he says. It was too late. The supplier hadn’t yet delivered the solution when the “Facebook revolution” crested in January. The government’s last-ditch attempts to quell online organizing included hacking and password-stealing attacks by Ben Ali’s regime, outside the purview of the Internet agency, Saadaoui says. Slim Amamou, a blogger who was arrested during the uprising and briefly became a minister for youth and sport after the revolution, says the presidential palace and ruling party orchestrated the final cyber attacks.

Today, Chakchouk, the new head of Tunisia’s Internet authority says he’s working to dismantle Ammar 404, and turned off the mass filtering, he says. Now he’s locked in legal battles over court orders to block specific Web pages. On Saturday, May 7, he and his team pulled an all-nighter to set the filtering equipment to block a single Web page to comply with a military court’s demand related to a defamation complaint. The following Tuesday, still looking tired, Chakchouk says it took so long because they were figuring out how to replace the page with a message explaining the blockage -- rather than the customary Error 404. Since the revolution, Chakchouk has spoken at conferences around the world, decrying censorship. Yet he won’t say much about surveillance. For now, the packet inspection boxes are still on the network. “We tried to understand the equipment and we’re still doing that,” he says. “We’re waiting for the new government to decide what to do with it.”

The collective formed in the days following the January 2011 uprising when it set up a "human rights media tent" in Tahrir Square as "a point to collect footage that people had of police abuses".

Asked whether they see themselves as activists or journalists, Hamilton explained how they have a "definite journalistic push". "We have a decentralised approach. We don't have an editorial policy, we don't have an editorial meeting at the beginning of the day to tell people where to go." Anyone can contribute footage, creating an "almost infinite number of camera people" who can be out filming, using mobile phones, DSLRs and hand-held video cameras.

"We are both attacking state media and trying to push traditional media outlets into taking a stronger stance and backing them up in being able to show things that perhaps felt they were unable to show. "We are also empowering everyone that has a camera phone to make them feel like they can contribute to a wider narrative rather than just uploading it to YouTube."

Mosireen is therefore reaching out to those without internet access, which is "one of the big, big, big challenges". "It's very easy to forget how hyper-connected we are compared to most of the world," Hamilton said

The citizen journalists have licensed footage under creative commons on YouTube and Vimeo, where others can download the films. These can be used by broadcasters.

It is not the international audience the activists are focused on. "We are in a fight that is going to be settled, or won or lost, here [in Egypt], so we don't need to spend too much time talking to or addressing international audiences. "It's really much more about Egyptian public opinion and the narrative within Egypt that is important, and helping people get access to the truth."

filtering at the keyword level results in overblocking, as banning the use of certain keywords to search for Web sites, not just images, prevents users from accessing—based on Microsoft’s definition of objectionable content—legitimate content such as sex education and encyclopedic information about homosexuality.

The current approach uses a region-wide standard for filtering content as opposed to the more targeted, granular, and country-specific policy. A more targeted approach—either country-based or preferably, defined by the user—is more generally consistent with minimizing the impact on freedom of speech. Through its involvement in the Global Network Initiative, Microsoft has signaled its willingness to be at the forefront in protecting freedom of expression around the world. It is difficult to reconcile this position with Bing’s current filtering standards.