This edition of the Middle East and North Africa CyberWatch covers topics such as censorship and surveillance, blogger and netizen arrests, cyber attacks and technological developments from the region.

Created in 1986, the Order of Ontario, the Canadian province’s highest official honour, recognizes the highest level of individual excellence and achievement in any field.

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert, former Post-Doctoral Fellow Stefania Milan and Senior Security Analyst Seth Hardy will participate in a conference hosted by the International Relations Society on Saturday, 26 January 2013.

Professor Deibert was featured in a Christian Science Monitor piece on cybersecurity, Cyber Security Awakening in 2013: How vulnerable to attack is US now?.

A joint investigation by Agentura.Ru, CitizenLab and Privacy International was published in Wired Magazine on 21 December, 2012.

In April 2010, China Telecom’s network announced incorrect paths to 50,000 IP prefixes, referred to as a “hijack”. The politically sensitive nature of some of the IP prefixes that were hijacked brought this incident to the attention of the US government. It raises many important questions about how we characterize and reason about large-scale routing incidents when they occur.

Our assessment of events that took place in 2012 has found that freedom of expression continues to be under threat in these parts of the world, although some progress has been made in certain countries. This review discusses trends in cyber attacks, changing legal norms, social media use, technological development, censorship and filtering, and arrests of rights activists.

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert spoke to Me Judice, a Dutch discussion forum, about new security issues in cyberspace.

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert has published a new article titled “The Growing Dark Side of Cyberspace ( . . . and What To Do About It)” in the Penn State Journal of Law & International Affairs, Volume 1, Issue 2, November 2012.

Google Policy Fellow Kieran Bergmann published an article for the Asia Pacific Memo. Bergmann’s article looked at Thailand’s lese majeste cases and the government’s method of controlling cyberspace.