I will be visiting Arseh Sevom, the Amsterdam-based organisation promoting civil society in Iran, on Friday and Saturday.
James Miller will be here this afternoon to take you through another Friday of developments in North Africa and the Middle East. Meanwhile, please keep the news and ideas coming into us via our Comments sections.
Arseh Sevom 
A Montage of Political Prisoners in IranThe UN Special Rapporteur has released an initial report on the human rights situation in Iran. The report highlights several disturbing trends, which serve to cripple civil society activism. These include:
Arseh Sevom Saturday, September 3, 2011 at 15:20 | James Miller in EA Iran, EA Middle East and Turkey, Middle East and Iran Earlier in the week, our colleagues at the civil society organistion Arseh Sevom assessed the security threat, possibly introduced by the Iranian regime, that left Google users in Iran susceptible to a rogue certificate attack.
Now, Arseh Sevom reanalyzes the threat in part 2 of the series. And they have an alarming piece of information, that users of Tor, Yahoo, and Mozilla may also have been compromised...
See Also, Iran Special: Assessing the Latest Cyber-Threat --- The "Rogue Certificate" (Arseh Sevom
Latest from Iran (3 September): Elections and the Revolution
UPDATE: Google and Mozilla have revoked more than 200 security certificates as a result of a hack into the accounts of certificate authority, DigiNotar.
Arseh Sevom, Firefox, Google, Iran, Mozilla, Roque Certificate, Security threat, Tor, Yahoo, cyber attack, cyber war 
Suppose you want to send mail to your brother. But an enemy somehow manages to get credentials of a postman and bribes or coerces his way into becoming the postman that takes your mail to your brother and brings his reply back. Now when you put mail in the mailbox, he will discard your mail and instead, write a mail himself and take that to your brother as if you had written it. Then, when your brother writes a reply to your mail, the postman picks that one up, discards it and writes a totally different reply and brings it back to you.
The result is that neither you nor your brother are able to communicate what you wish to communicate to each other if the enemy wishes to alter your message. Worse, even if he doesn’t, any secret that you sent, including your addresses and passwords are now the property of the enemy. Now imagine the government of Iran or another government being that postman, reading every message you send over Google…
UPDATE 1530 GMT: The Parliament has referred the legislation on civil institutions back to committee after the Speaker, Ali Larijani, criticised "ambiguities" in the language of the bill.
---
The Majlis, Iran’s Parliament, is in the process of approving a bill that, according to civil activists, aims at eliminating independent civil institutions and replacing them with a government organization. According to the provisions of this bill not only are individuals who plan to establish non-governmental or civil organizations required to be fully cleared and approved by the Ministry of Intelligence and supervisory committees, but even organizations that already have operational licenses and have been active need to reapply for new permits. If the latter are not approved, the supreme supervisory committee will annul their current permits and ban their activities.
Although their 2005 electoral triumph provided the hardliners with a golden opportunity to inhibit dissent, it failed to solve most of the inherent flaws of the Islamic Republic and, consequently, left the root of dissent very much intact. As a result, in the context of mounting economic and social problems, including ongoing tension with the United States, Iran’s theocracy continues to face an increasingly dissatisfied population. Indeed, as the state continues to deny the public’s aspirations for civil rights and democracy, Iranian dissident groups have persisted in fighting back, using alternative forums of communication, such as the Internet, to facilitate their expressions of discontent.
Arseh Sevom, an organisation promoting civil society in Iran, has introduced a new publication. We will be featuring some of the articles, but for now we turn it over to Arseh Sevom's Tori Egherman:
This is the first issue of Arseh Sevom's Civil Society Zine. For the first topic, we chose to look at networks and networking: traditional, social, and digital. When we started soliciting contributions in 2010, there was no "Arab Spring". No one knew that protesters in Tunisia and Egypt would be able to unseat long-term leaders and inspire movements all over the Arab world.
A democratic government necessitates a strong democratic society without which it cannot sustain itself.
- Expansion of the discourses of democracy, human rights, and peace for the creation of a healthy, vital and democratic society.
- Development of knowledge and skills on networking, advocacy, leadership, peace-building, and civil society building.
- Empowerment of the political, social, cultural, and digital environments as key strategies in the transition to democracy and strengthening of civil society. Empowerment of citizens through increasing awareness, education on rights and responsibilities, expansion of knowledge and skills to work within associations, and practice with democracy at the micro-level.
- Development and expansion of communications and relations with international civil society.
- Reconstruction of social networks both in physical and cyber space and expansion of cooperation and solidarity among civil activists; coalition among civil society organizations; and coalition-building with international civil society.
- Development of a strategy to combat the imposing culture of silence, stagnation, and limitations on the circulation of information;media-pluralism and free access to information among activists and organizations.
