Themes 1002

North Africa: are political websites more likely to get hacked?

Political opposition websites in North African countries, particularly in Tunisia, Libya and Mauritania, are becoming a primary target of hackers. This new phenomenon of defacing opposition and dissident websites emerged first in Tunisia, where at least 14 websites and blogs were targeted between 2007 and 2008, and seems to be spreading across the region as a result of the attempt to muzzle free […]

Tunisia: Video message to Barack Obama

We all remember what the French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared, in his victory speech, shortly after winning the French presidential election in 2007: “I want to issue a call to everyone in the world who believes in the values of tolerance, freedom, democracy, humanism, to all those who are persecuted by tyranny, by dictatorships […] I want to tell them that it will be France’s pride and its duty to be at their side.

Staff Finds White House in the Technological Dark Ages

Washingtonpost.com : Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts. What […]

You, too, can defeat cruel dictators online

The extensive palace complex of Tunisia’s septuagenarian dictator, President Zine el-Abidine ben Ali, for example, is off limits to his citizens. Anyone caught taking photographs of the vast complex are likely to be arrested. But cyberspace is beyond President ben Ali’s reach. There his palace is besieged by human rights activists.

Intellectuals’ responsibility in the collapse of the democratic process in Tunisia

Needless to say, there are in Tunisia, just like everywhere else, many historians, writers, and poets, filmmakers, who have never signed a single petition against torture or corruption, while considering themselves in private as democrats. Should we blame the collapse of the democratic process on them ? May be they have not to be blamed because they are not intellectuals at all.

History Is Not the Past

Submitted by Suffet De Carthage : That history is not a thing of the past is a general truth, of which I simply want to remind the reader. History is not the tale of bygone days, but the present we dwell in.11 It is part and parcel of a nation; it constitutes its memory, its consciousness, its ambitions. It is what is everlasting in its geography and demography. It is the mirror of the nation’s […]