The following speech was given by Kareem Amer at Google's Illicit Networks summit conference on July 19, 2012:   "I was set free from fear at a very early stage in my life. Most of you would be surprised to hear how I became free of fear. I was raised in an extremist family with a Salafist background. I know this sounds strange, but it helped set me free from fear. I had bad experiences in...

The following was taken from Rantings of a Sandmonkey on July 18, 2012. Morsy, the Human Being Originally Published in the Daily News Egypt During the first and second round of the presidential elections I always had a problem with regarding President Mohamed Morsy as a real human being with real dreams, real fears and ambitions. I always viewed him as something unreal and virtual,...

On July 3, 2012, Syrian activist and CyberDissidents.org blogger board member, Hadeel Kouki, arrived in the United States after being granted humanitarian parole by the American Embassy in Bern, Switzerland. At 21 years-old, Kouki is one of the few young Syrian Christian dissidents who was arrested and tortured by Assad’s forces for over 40 days. Kouki fled Syria in December 2011 and was...

The following was taken from The Sandmonkey, to view the original, click here. In my humble opinion, today concludes the end of the first chapter of the Egyptian revolution. I know that other people have it divided into sections in regards to original 18 days, elections, parliament and presidential elections, but I don’t subscribe to that. We went into the revolution with the same...

The following article first appeared on The Daily Beast. To access, click HERE.  In his 25 years at Random House, Robert Bernstein published authors from William Faulkner to Dr. Seuss. After traveling to the Soviet Union in 1973, Bernstein began a second long career in the human-rights movement, advocating for Soviet dissidents and fighting to publish writers, like Vaclav Havel, who were...