17 December 2020, Ten years ago today, 26-year old Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in protest over injustice and state marginalization, igniting mass uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and other countries across the Middle East and North Africa. As we mark the 10th anniversary of the Arab[...]
The undersigning human rights organizations denounce the Egyptian authorities’ blocking of at least 600 websites since May 2017 including media, political and human rights platforms. Blocking websites is a violation of people’ rights for access to information and freedom of expression. The Egyptian authorities have been using the equipment of[...]
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[...]
Egyptian authorities are arresting an increasing number of women on different charges related to their social media activity; in some cases, female TikTok users are receiving prison sentences and forced to pay hefty fines. The most recent case, which asserts that the accused women’s videos on TikTok stand in “violation[...]
Feature image Egypt today, July 2018: A screenshot from Mona el-Mazbouh’s apology video. A Lebanese tourist was sentenced to eight years in Egyptian prison after viral video on Facebook. Mona el-Mazbouh, 24, posted a video complaining about the sexual harassment she had experienced in Cairo while on vacation. The video[...]
Last week, the Egyptian parliament approved a draconian also known as the Cybercrimes law, which compels Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Egypt to censor content and collect data on users at the behest of the government and outlines harsh punishments for individuals. Violators of this law can face up to[...]
Feature image via Youtube: The image Youtube presents when a video is no longer available. On Saturday, Egypt’s Supreme Administrative Court ruled to uphold a lower administrative court’s decision instructing the Ministry of Communications and Information to block YouTube for 30 days. This ruling came in response to YouTube’s alleged[...]
A targeted, albeit relatively unsophisticated, cyberespionage campaign with servers based in Iran has targeted the Android mobile devices of users in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, and Iran, according to a recent report from the Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab. Following the publication of the report, an independent hacker dumped some of the[...]
Feature image via Pixel. This week, authorities arrested journalists, bloggers, and human rights activists in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Early Wednesday morning, Egyptian police raided the home of journalist and blogger Wael Abbas and arrested him. His whereabouts are still unknown but authorities confiscated his personal computer, phones, and books,[...]
Feature image via Wikimedia Egypt, June 17, 2011: Commons A taxi in Alexandria. Almost exactly one month after Uber suspended its services in Morocco, an administrative court has ordered Uber and Careem, the Emirati ridesharing service, to do the same in Egypt. The case began in 2016 when 42 Egyptian[...]
