This Week In Cyberspace

Maryam Abdulhadi Al-Khawaja is a Bahraini-Danish human rights activist. It seems to run in the family because She is also the daughter of Bahraini human rights activist Abdulhadi al-Khawaja and former co-director of the Gulf Center for Human Rights. She is currently the Special Advisor on Advocacy with the GCHR, and works as a consultant with NGOs.

Roger Dingledine is an American computer scientist known for having co-founded the Tor Project and he still works there as a project Leader, Director, and Research Director. The Tor Project develops and maintains The Tor Browser system, also known as The Onion Router, a free, open source and sophisticated privacy tool that provides anonymity for web surfing and communication. Hear about this and t...

Gbenga Sesa is the Executive Director of Paradigm Initiative, a non-profit organisation that works to connect under-served young Africans with digital opportunities and ensures the protection of their online rights.  Having grown his career from local volunteering to the global stage, where he is currently shaping and influencing tech policies, his drive to effect positive change, empower young Af...

Marwa Fatafta leads Access Now’s policy and advocacy work on digital rights in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Her work spans a number of issues at the nexus of human rights and technology including content governance and platform accountability, online censorship, digital surveillance, and transnational repression.

Costanza Sciubba Caniglia is an expert in information integrity and leads Wikimedia Foundation’s anti-disinformation strategy.  Wikipedia relies on 250,000 volunteers worldwide who edit anonymously. Truth Keepers in the face of powerful forces.

Chihhao Yu is a software engineer and information designer, and co-director of the Taiwan Information Environment Research Center (IORG) based here in Taipei, where he works to safeguard election integrity and build democratic resilience in Taiwan.  He is also a contributor to g0v (“gov-zero”), Taiwan’s civic hacking community, and an organiser of Facing the Ocean, a West Pacific civic hacking net...

Charles Mok is a Research Scholar at the Global Digital Policy Incubator of the Cyber Policy Center at Stanford University, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society, and a board member of the International Centre for Trade Transparency and Monitoring. 

Lobsang Gyatso Sither is the Director of Technology at the Tibet Action Institute working in exile as a highly experienced digital security trainer. He talks to us about some of the issues within his home country and how the Tibetan Government in exile is hoping for the best but preparing for the worst under Chinese occupation.

Aws Al-Saadi is an advisory board member of International Fact-Checking Network and the Founder and President of Tech4Peace. He talks to TWICS about the rise of fake news and how to counter it.

 Hadi Al Khatib is an archivist and activist who’s been collecting, verifying, and investigating citizen-generated data as evidence of human rights violations since 2011. His project, The Syrian Archive, exposes and draws attention to human rights violations committed by all sides of the Syrian conflict, and ensures that journalists and lawyers are able to use the verified data for their investiga...

Tetiana Avdieieva is a Senior Legal Counsel at Digital Security Lab in Ukraine. She’s also a member of the Expert Committee on Artificial Intelligence under the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine. She co-authored the media law reform in Ukraine and is currently engaged in AI governance processes both in Ukraine and on the Council of Europe level. Woah! What a glittery interview.

Lia Holland is from Fight for the Future, a group of artists, engineers, activists, and technologists fighting for a future where technology is a force for liberation— not oppression. An organization focused on technology and the rules governing it, fighting at the intersection of technology and human rights.

E-ling Chiu is the Executive Director at Amnesty International Taiwan. where RightsCon2025 is currently underway. She is also a Board Member on the Human Rights Network for Tibet and Taiwan. We talk with her about some of the issues facing this small island including cable cutting, the death penalty and the impact of having such a powerful neighbour as China just across the Taiwan Strait.

David Kaye is a clinical professor of law at the University of California, where he teaches international human rights law and international humanitarian law. David works at the intersection of technology, freedom of speech and democratic deliberation. He was also the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression up until 2020.  He shares h...

Aymen Zaghdoudi is Access Now’s Middle East and North African Senior Policy Counsel.  He is also an assistant Professor at the Institute of Press and Information Sciences in Tunisia where he teaches Press law, Media regulation, and Constitutional law. He shares stories of dissent from his experience on the ground in Tunisia.

Betsy Popken is the Executive Director of the Human Rights Center at UC Berkeley School of Law where she directs the Climate Justice program, and leads a team that’s conducting human rights impact assessments and evaluations of General large language models. She speaks with us about how digitalisation is disrupting traditional warfare around the world.

Antonio Zappulla is CEO at the Thomson Reuters Foundation and in 2022 he was knighted as an Officer of the Italian Republic for “merit acquired in the fields of public service, and social, philanthropic and humanitarian activities” under the OMRI order, the highest-ranking honour of the Italian Republic. We talk with him about LGBTQ rights in the digital age and how to protect NGOs from legal chal...

Natalia Krapiva is the tech-legal Counsel with Access Now. Prior to that she worked as a prosecutor at Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. She's been fighting NSO Group to try to limit the sale and use of spyware for many years and  last December set a precedent with a win against this Israeli cyber-intelligence firm in the California court. We talk to her about this and the state of digital fore...

Taiwan has endured the world’s longest Marshall Law - 37 years - under Chinese rule. Kuan-Ju Chou is from the Taiwan Association for Human Rights and she is at RightsCon 2025 in Taipei. It's the first time in a decade that the conference has been held in South East Asia and activists are building connections and solidarity.

One of the featured thought leaders at the opening ceremony of RightsCon 2025 was Htaike Htaike Aung . She’s the Executive Director at Myanmar Internet Communication Technologies for Development Organization  or MIDO, and she spoke with us about some of the challenges faced by citizens in a country that has endured four years of a military coup and 83 internet shutdowns.

We’re in Taipei speaking with some incredible people working to advance human rights in the digital age. One of those at the forefront of this is Henri Verdier the French Ambassador for Digital Affairs within the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs.  Since 2018, he has led and co-ordinated French digital diplomacy and he was instrumental in last week’s AI Action Summit in Paris hosted b...

Mohammed al-Maskati is one of the 3,200 people participating live at RightsCon 2025 in Taipei. He is a Bahraini human rights activist who worked as a digital security consultant for the Middle East and North Africa. He founded the Bahrain Youth Society for Human Rights (BYSHR), and currently works with AccessNow as the Digital Security Helpline Director .

We have set up in the Media Room at RightsCon 2025 Taipei and are getting ready for an amazing few days of interviews with some of the best brains in the biz. These are people working at the forefront of human rights in the digital age. Stay tuned to meet some amazing activists over the coming days.

We're in Taiwan where thousands of human rights activists are gathering for RightCon2025. This is a conference started by TWICS co-host Brett Solomon and this will be the first time that he's attending not as CEO of the organising body AccessNow but as a podcaster! He and Nell Schofield will be talking with around 25 global leaders who are defending and extending human rights in the digita...

Satellite internet technology is go! But does it, as promised, help to close the digital divide? At least 2.6 billion people worldwide are still unable to access high-quality, open, secure internet, despite all the satellites up there. SpaceX’s Starlink has nearly 7k satellites circling the Earth with plans for another 23,000!! And astronomers are concerned because the sunlight reflecting off them...