Campaigns against online censorship in the Middle East
By chance, I came across two new projects within a week dedicated to ending online censorship and surveillance in Middle Eastern countries. The first, OpenArab.net (English here), is a project out of HRInfo.net in Egypt.
The Initiative For an Open Arab Internet is an initiative by the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (HRinfo) advocating free use of the Internet without censorship, blocking or spying. In this context, the initiative seeks to provide international and Arab information and internet related documents. The initiative also defends internet users, web-designers, and writers by organising legal and media campaigns and highlighting practices restricting Internet freedom.
Through HRInfo.net's human rights blogging project, Katib, I also found Article 19's campaign against online censorship in Iran, The Persian Impediment. Where OpenArab.net's project is mostly in Arabic and appears to be aimed at people in the region, The Persian Impediment site is entirely in English (so far as I've seen) and is probably internationally directed. There hasn't been a lot of activity on the site that I can see since early January (the site allows contributors to join a blogged discussion on suggested topics, and/or to report cases of censorship), but it's worth a look regardless.