Our own Jody Mahoney sent in reports from WSIS (the World Summit on the Information Society conference held in Tunis in November).  Now she's written up her thoughts as Notes from Abroad: Human Rights and Web 2.0. Jody writes:

Freedom takes on a new meaning in a place where you encounter checkpoints and controlled entries at every turn; where sharpshooters cradling automatic weapons line the road for miles and armed police and national guardsmen are present everywhere.

Yet the barriers were not merely physical. In my hotel room late one night, I attempted to load the Transnational Radical Party's URL onto my browser in order to research its Open Source session, scheduled for the following day. It hadn’t occurred to me that the site -- like many others whose contents might be perceived as dissenting -- would be blocked by the Tunisian government.

Yet it also dawned on me that even the most repressive government would never be able to silence every blogger, especially when, around the world, many are willing to risk their personal safety -- and even their lives -- to write.

Two weeks after WSIS, Egyptian blogger and online journalist Ahmad Abdollah was awakened by State Security Intelligence officers, who had surrounded his home before breaking in with machine guns to confiscate books, hard drives, and CDs. 

The whole thing is definitely worth the read.
 

tagged: wsis, techsoup, article, jodymahoney, freedom