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To a Better 2012

It’s with a conflicted heart that I put to bed 2011.  For me, on a personal level, it was a year of both great triumph and great tragedy.  As many of you know, not long after moving across the country, far from my family, I lost my father.  I must admit, it was both easier [...]

31.12.2011

1 Comment

On Anonymity, Privacy, Rights, and Responsibility.

This week, I stepped in the middle of a petty fight between two bloggers on opposite ends of the political spectrum. The first, Richard Silverstein, had put up a post in which he claimed to have come across the real identity of anonymous blogger “Aussie Dave”, on Facebook. My immediate thought, upon seeing the screenshots [...]

31.12.2011

23 Comments

Do solidarity campaigns really help bloggers?

Edit: A Saudi contact points out that campaigns have been helpful in the cases of Manal al-Sharif and Feras Begnah, but adds: “It seems that only when it’s way too silly to arrest people, massive attention will be given and the government is likely to [surrender].” When Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy was briefly detained–and beaten–by [...]

29.12.2011

6 Comments

To Regulate (Or Preferably Not): On Mueller’s claim of misdirected resistance to surveillance technology

A pair of blog posts this week from Milton Mueller have sparked multiple conversations filling my inbox (as well as an unprecedented amount of passive aggression, of which I do not approve, but the sheer number of people practicing it makes me reticent to name names). The posts take on the emerging cottage industry of [...]

29.12.2011

3 Comments

A Letter to My Dad

This, my 30th Christmas, is the first without you. You always managed to find me somewhere, and I’ll never forget–beyond the many spent in Dover and Portsmouth, driving around or strolling in Prescott Park–the Christmases in New York, Boston, Amsterdam, and Marrakesh. I had hoped to spend my 31st Christmas with you in California, but [...]

24.12.2011

9 Comments

Our Circumvention Research DOES NOT Support SOPA

Daniel Castro of The Information Technology & Innovation Fund recently published a paper supporting the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) currently being debated in congress. In that report, he claims that research performed by us supports the domain name system (DNS) filtering mechanisms mandated by SOPA. This claim is a distortion of our work. We [...]

22.12.2011

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On Prince Waleed and Twitter

There’s been quite a bit of buzz over the news today that Saudi Prince Waleed has invested $300m in Twitter. I barely paid attention to the news at first, considering the massive list of companies that the prince’s company, Kingdom Holdings, has invested in (including Amazon, eBay, and PriceLine, among many others, not to mention [...]

19.12.2011

2 Comments

Havel on the slow burn of democratic change

“We must not be afraid of dreaming the seemingly impossible if we want the seemingly impossible to become a reality” – Václav Havel Thanks to the faded receipt stuck between its dog-eared pages, I know that I purchased Václav Havel’s The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice on February 17, 1999, my [...]

19.12.2011

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#Dec15, a day of gratitude

When I lost my dad on November 29, what surprised me the most wasn’t my feelings, but the outpouring of love–emails, phone calls, Facebook and Twitter messages–I received from all over the world.  I tagged the emails “#Dad” and archived them, unable to read them with feelings still raw.  I thanked as many people as [...]

15.12.2011

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The Definitive Collection of Thomas Friedman Takedowns

As my colleague and current couchmate Trevor Timm pointed out, it is ironic that today of all days I have chosen to compile the definitive collection of hilarious Thomas Friedman takedowns. Why today, you ask? Because today Thomas Friedman actually made sense. Mull that one over for a moment. It’s okay, take your time. As [...]

14.12.2011

7 Comments

Razan, Alaa, Ali.

I’ve spoken publicly quite a few times about the influence of the Arabloggers network, an organic network that Sami Ben Gharbia turned into a semi-annual conference in the summer of 2008 in Beirut (at which all three above were present, though this picture is from Budapest that same summer) and repeated in Beirut 2009 and [...]

05.12.2011

2 Comments

Another Arrest

I am really fucking tired of seeing my good friends, one by one, arrested by hideous regimes. First it was Ali, who remains in hiding from the US-supported Bahraini government, then it was Slim (who thankfully went free shortly thereafter), then Alaa, who might miss the birth of his first child because of the US-supported [...]

04.12.2011

4 Comments

Heart of Gold: In Memory of My Dad

For as long as I can remember, people have told me I look like my dad. Occasionally—in our somewhat small town of Dover, New Hampshire, anyway—upon passing me in the street, people have felt a compulsion to exclaim, “You must be Terry York’s daughter!” After an anxiety- and angst-filled adolescence, I promised myself that je [...]

03.12.2011

15 Comments