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"The public will of the population of the Swat region is at the center of all efforts, and it should be taken into account while debating the merits of this agreement." In legislative elections a year ago, the people of Swat, a region that is about the size of Delaware and has 1.3 million residents, voted overwhelmingly for the secular Awami National Party. Since then, the Taliban have singled out elected politicians with suicide bomb attacks and chased virtually all of them from the valley. Several hundred thousand residents have also fled the fighting.

One of the defeated moderate candidates in Iran's presidential election, Mehdi Karroubi, has accused security forces of using harsher methods than Israel."The behaviour of Iran's security agents is worse than those of the Zionist in occupied Palestine,"

They gave to all us a paper to write down our home addresses along with our emails and passwords.

Some times a guard would come in to the cell with his face covered and then would leave without saying a word.

The interrogator asked the question and we had to write down the answer on the paper. The questions included: what were you doing the day you were arrested; what do think of the election; what do you think of the protests and the demonstration?”

Syrian officials have been silent on Lebanon for weeks, unlike Americans - an irony that must really tick them off given how insistent American officials have been about the need for smooth elections untainted by foreign meddling.

Many Syrian Christians are gratified by Aoun’s turn toward Syria because it provides them with a strong political figure who is not a Geagea or Jemayyal. It shows that even Lebanese Christians stand with Syria. They are not alone.

Damascus too may feel a certain relief in the very highest halls of the foreign ministry. It has avoided the complications of an Hizbullah win, which could have strained already bad relations with the US even further. The Lebanon situation will take some of the oomph out of Syrian hardliners, who may believe that Syria is winning the long term struggle for Arab public opinion and can afford to play hardball with Washington.

the rollout of the speech already stands as one of the most successful public diplomacy and strategic communications campaigns I can ever remember -- and hopefully a harbinger of what is to come.  This wasn't a one-off Presidential speech.  The succession of statements (al-Arabiya interview, Turkish Parliament, message to the Iranians) and the engagement on the Israeli-Palestinian policy front set the stage.  Then the White House unleashed the full spectrum of new media engagement for this speech -- SMS and Twitter updates, online video, and online chatroom environment, and more.  This will likely be followed up upon to put substance on the notion of this as a "conversation" rather than an "address" -- which along with concrete policy progress will be the key to its long-term impact, if any. 

It's not like Bush left a legacy of active democratization which Obama is supposedly abandoning.  Rather than repeat the old buzzwords to please those invested in the democracy promotion industry, Obama did something more important by addressing head on some of the most vexing issues which have plagued American thinking about democracy in the region. This, to my eye, was the key statement:  America respects the right of all peaceful and law-abiding voices to be heard around the world, even if we disagree with them. And we will welcome all elected, peaceful governments - provided they govern with respect for all their people.  As I noted yesterday, that suggests clearly that the U.S. will accept the democratic participation of peaceful Islamist movements as long as they abstain from violence --and respect their electoral victories provided that they commit to the democratic process.  He made a passionate defense of that latter point, that victors must demonstrate tolerance and respect for minorities and that elections alone are not enough.  But he clearly did not prejudge participants in the electoral game -- the old canard about Islamists wanting "one man, one vote, one time" thankfully, and significantly, did not appear.

Many such dissenters have, indeed, made great use of the Web. In Ukraine young activists relied on new–media technologies to mobilize supporters during the Orange Revolution. Colombian protesters used Facebook to organize massive rallies against FARC, the leftist guerrillas. The shocking and powerful pictures that surfaced from Burma during the 2007 anti–government protests—many of them shot by local bloggers with cell phones—quickly traveled around the globe. Democratic activists in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe used the Web to track vote rigging in last year’s elections and used mobile phones to take photos of election results that were temporarily displayed outside the voting booths (later, a useful proof of the irregularities). Plenty of other examples—from Iran, Egypt, Russia, Belarus, and, above all, China—attest to the growing importance of technology in facilitating dissent.

But drawing conclusions about the democratizing nature of the Internet may still be premature. The major challenge in understanding the relationship between democracy and the Internet— aside from developing good measures of democratic improvement—has been to distinguish cause and effect. That is always hard, but it is especially difficult in this case because the grandiose promise of technological determinism—the idealistic belief in the Internet’s transformative power—has often blinded even the most sober analysts.

investing in new media infrastructure might also embolden the conservatives, nationalists, and extremists, posing an even greater challenge to democratization. A brief look at the emerging cyber–nationalism in Russia and China provides a taste of things to come.

The Senate has authorized up to $50 million for the development of Web-based tools to help Iranians evade their government's attempts to censor the Internet. The Victim of Iranian Censorship Act, or VOICE Act, was added to the Senates Defense authorization bill Thursday evening as a response to mass protests following Iran's disputed June 12 presidential elections and concerns that Western companies have sold Iran technology used to monitor dissidents. Internet-based tools such as Facebook and Twitter have become key means for Iranians to communicate with each other and the outside world about protests over what many believe to be a fraudulent victory by incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The U.S. legislation would require President Obama to issue a report on "non-Iranian companies, including corporations with U.S. subsidiaries, that have aided the Iranian governments Internet censorship efforts." Such identification would make it easier to pressure firms to cease such business with Iran.

the Voice of America has an office devoted to anti-filtering technology and anti-censorship technology, but its total budget is less than $5 million. It has invested in a Farsi-language version of the Web browser, Firefox, embedded with TOR, a program originally developed by the U.S. Navy, which cloaks the users Web browsing from state monitors.

when there is money, people will come, and you are seeing a lot of companies retooling themselves to become circumvention providers.