SMEX is looking for a technical support specialist, familiar with the Hopin platform to assist in the production of the 2020 edition of Bread&Net, our annual conference on digital rights. This offer is project-based (around 25 hours). Key Responsibilities: Use video streaming tools effectively to produce a live stream to[...]
This article is a crosspost from Global Voices. Editor’s note: This article is part of UPROAR, a Small Media initiative that is urging governments to address digital rights challenges at the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). As new protests erupt in Lebanon, online repression is set to continue. In recent weeks,[...]
Governments in various Arab countries are increasingly investing in financial and human resources to control internet content and the free flow of information. They exercise systematic censorship of information by targeting different aspects of communications technologies. By contrast, several civil society organizations and activists in the Arab region are countering[...]
On September 23, Zoom cancelled a virtual event featuring the Palestinian Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s (PFLP) veteran Leila Khaled. The virtual event was organized by the Arab and Muslim Ethnicity and Diasporas Studies (AMED Studies) at San Francisco State University (SFSU). After the event was announced on[...]
This year, governments in the Middle East and North Africa have continued to shut down and throttle the internet during grade and high school examinations. So far, governments in Jordan, Syria, Algeria, and Sudan have disrupted the internet during examinations. We call on governments across the region to refrain from[...]
This article is a crosspost from Global Voices. This article is part of UPROAR, a Small Media initiative that is urging governments to address digital rights challenges at the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). If the Arab Spring highlighted one phenomenon about digital upheaval, cyber-activism and democratization, it was this: the[...]
On September 1, the Ministry of Public Health launched Ma3an – Together Against Corona, a contact-tracing application intended to stop the spread of Covid-19. After a preliminary review, SMEX found that although the application collects limited personal data, it contains a few security flaws. The Ministry of Public Health, in[...]
On September 8, many websites in Lebanon, including governmental ones, were hacked by an alleged Iranian hacker. After a quick analysis, the SMEX tech team found that all the hacked websites are hosted on the same server managed by Terranet, a local Lebanese ISP and hosting provider. A deeper look[...]
The advent of COVID-19 (known locally as the coronavirus) in Lebanon last February has further deepened existing divisions within certain cities and villages: communities were either branded “epicentres” of the COVID-19 outbreak, or residents were considered blessed to have genetic and/or layered immunity against the virus. This was largely due[...]
In the wake of the August 4th explosion in Beirut, there was a significant response from civil society trying to help in every way possible. Some NGOs undertook the task of distributing essential and urgent humanitarian aid, while others prepared for the reconstruction phase. The organizations working on all these[...]
