In a piece for Agence France Press, Citizen Lab Senior Researcher Sarah McKune was quoted in response to a recent report outlying alleged Chinese hacking of US firms.

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.

This month’s Social Media Watch looks at the privacy concerns around Facebook’s Graph Search, an open letter to Skype detailing concerns about its practices, several noteworthy legislative privacy stories and several other policy, security and privacy stories from the social media community.

Blue Coat Devices capable of filtering, censorship, and surveillance are being used around the world. 61 of these Blue Coat appliances are on public or government networks in countries with a history of concerns over human rights, surveillance, and censorship. Our findings support the need for national and international scrutiny of Blue Coat implementations in the countries we have identified, and a closer look at the global proliferation of “dual-use” information and communication technologies.

This appendix contains countries of interest in which Blue Coat devices were located.

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.

This edition of the Southeast Asia CyberWatch covers Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand.

This blog post from Citizen Lab partner, ASL19, discusses Iran’s planned National Information Network.

The Citizen Lab, Russian secret services watchdog Agentura.Ru, and Privacy International have launched a collaborative project to examine ‘Russia’s Surveillance State.’ As part of this project, Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan of Agentura.Ru published a piece in Wired magazine on November 1, 2012, titled The Kremlin’s New Internet Surveillance Plan Goes Live Today.