"The power of women is in their stories. They are not theories, they are real lives that, thanks to social networks, we are able to share and exchange," said Egyptian-American activist Mona el-Tahawey, kicking off a summit that brought more than a hundred of the Middle East's leading female activists...

Blogger Maikel Nabil was sentenced to two years in prison yesterday, a one-year reduction from his three-year sentence handed down on Apr. 11 by a military tribunal in closed session. Nabil was tried by a military tribunal, despite being a civilian, joining the 12,000 people who have been...

Governments are supposed to be representatives of the people, delegates of their citizens, trustees of the public good. Yet too often we see that officials, once elected or anointed, hold information close the vest and are loathe to share with the public. Information is power, and in repressive regimes, the...

Twitter, the microblog people love to hate, turned 5 this week. Twitter is probably most famous for the celebrities and politicians that use it to communicate with their fan bases, but in the Middle East Twitter is better known as a tool of political dissent and social mobilization. Deposed Egyptian...

"I heard em say the revolution wont be televised; Aljazeera proved em wrong, Twitter has him paralyzed." So begins an American hip-hop song that has become an anthem of the revolution. In authoritarian regimes the spread of information is a subversive act. Twittering, Facebooking and blogging are all about spreading...

It's oh so tempting for the mainstream media to give what's happening in Egypt a pithy label, and for a new media scholar like myself, I would seem to have a vested interest as well, but if I have learned anything through my five years studying cyberactivism in...

Kareem Amer, the first Egyptian blogger to be prosecuted for the content of his writings, was released Tuesday after serving a four-year sentence for defaming Islam and President Hosni Mubarak. His sentence expired Nov. 5, but upon being released he was immediately re-arrested, pretty par for the course in terms...

If you were a scientist would you really want to get a prize from a dictator? Would you want one of the world's worst human rights abusers to "honor" you with an award, even if it was filtered through the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)? UNESCO's decision...

Are repression and surveillance really the antidote to terrorism? Or are they the surest bet for authoritarian leaders struggling to maintain their grip on power amid an onslaught of digital technologies that facilitate the free flow of information?

The debate over demands by a growing list of countries, including Egypt,...