Iranian human rights activist Nasrin Sotoudeh sits starving in a prison cell in Tehran. Twenty-five years ago that was me. The prison was Leningrad, but the story was the same: a mother of young children punished by a dictatorial regime, yearning for the basic freedoms Americans sometimes take for granted.
Controlling thought and opinion is impossible in today's connected world. Jordanians, the majority of whom are under 25, are able to quickly overcome direct website blockades by electronically bypassing them, but the government does not trust them to be mature enough to decipher the content of the news.