Survey Team - IGIF 2009

Freedom House Freedom on the Net

Survey Team

Contributing Authors

Yaman Akdeniz is an associate professor at the CyberLaw Research Unit, School of Law, University of Leeds (UK) where he teaches and writes mainly about internet related legal and policy issues. He is also the founder and director of Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties, a non-profit civil liberties organization. He has acted as an expert to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) and published extensively on topics related to policing the internet. He is a graduate of the University of Leeds (PhD). He served as the analyst for Turkey and the United Kingdom.

Raman Jit Singh Chima is currently completing a degree in Arts and Law from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore. He has clerked for the Honorable Justice V.S. Sirpurkar of the Supreme Court of India, and is Chief Editor of the Indian Journal of Law and Technology. He was a Sarai-CSDS Independent Research Fellow in 2007, examining the regulation of the Internet by the Indian state. He served as the analyst for India.

Ming Kuok Lim is an advanced doctoral student in the College of Communications at Penn State University. His research focuses on the relationship between the use of new media, such as blogging, and the development of democracy. He has conducted a series of interviews with prominent bloggers in Malaysia and has served as an analyst for Freedom in the World for Singapore and Malaysia. He served as the analyst for Malaysia.

Mariam Memarsadeghi advises human rights and democracy promotion organizations internationally and is an outspoken advocate for women’s rights and civil liberties in Islamic contexts.  She is an expert on free media, internet freedom and internet initiatives for repressive regime contexts and founded the bi-lingual web magazine Gozaar: A Journal on Democracy and Human Rights in Iran while serving as Senior Program Manager at Freedom House. She has studied political science and political theory at Dickinson College (BA) and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst (MA) and is fluent in English and her native Persian. She served as the analyst for Iran.

Ory Okolloh is a lawyer, a political activist and blogger. She is the co-founder of Mzalendo, a website that tracks the performance of Kenyan Members of Parliament, and the co-founder of Ushahidi. She is a frequent speaker at conferences including TED Global and Poptech on issues around citizen journalism, the role of technology in Africa, and the role of young people in reshaping the future of Africa. Ms. Okolloh graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. degree in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh, and graduated with a J.D. from Harvard Law School. She also writes one of the most popular blogs in the Kenyan sphere at Kenyan Pundit. She served as the analyst for Kenya and South Africa.

Giorgi (Giga) Paitchadze is the founder of the Georgian NGO New Media Institute, a veteran blogger, and political analyst. He has served as a trainer and educator in blogging and new media and as the organizer of the Caucasus BarCamp – a weekend retreat and educational training camp for bloggers from the Caucasus region. He is also the founder of Georgia’s first social networking site, face.ge. He holds a postgraduate degree in International Relations and International Law (LL.M.). He served as the analyst for Georgia.

Carolina Rossini is a Fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard University and also coordinates a project on policy for Open Educational Resources in Brazil with the Open Society institute. She holds positions at the Diplo Foundation as a fellow for the Internet Governance Program and at IQSensato as a Research Associate for the Access to Knowledge and Innovation Program. She is a Brazilian lawyer and a law lecturer, and was part of Brazilian Creative Commons team at Fundacao Getulio Vargas Law School, where she coordinated the Legal Clinical Program and the CC Latin America chapter of the Open Business project. Before moving to academic life, Ms. Rossini acted as in-house counsel for the Telefonica Telecommunications Group in Brazil focus in internet and telecom services. She served as the analyst for Brazil.

Alexey Sidorenko received his MA in Geography from Moscow State University and is currently based at Warsaw University. He is working on both a PhD in geography at Moscow and an MA in cultural studies at Warsaw. Both dissertations are dedicated to the juncture of politics, ICT and regional studies on the post soviet space. He worked for three years in Moscow for the Carnegie Centre, as a research assistant for the projects "Society and Regions" and "Russian Domestic Politics and Political Institutions". He is interested in electoral geography, cybergeography and in the internet and political representation in Russia, Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia. He served as the analyst for Russia.

Linnar Viik is an Estonian information society and innovation analyst and lecturer. He has worked part-time as Adviser to the Prime Minister of Estonia on Information Technology and Research & Development, and as the Head of the Secretariat of the Research and Development Council of the Government of Estonia and is also Member of Estonian Research and Development Council and Information Society Board. He received degrees in IT management and international economics at Tallinn Technical University and the University of Helsinki. He has published over 150 articles and research papers. He served as the analyst for Estonia.

The analysts for the reports on China, Cuba, Egypt and Tunisia are independent internet researchers who have requested to remain anonymous.

Ratings Review Advisers

Jon B. Alterman is director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. He received his PhD in history from Harvard University, and he has worked on the personal staff of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan and on the policy-planning staff at the U.S. Department of State. He is the author of New Media, New Politics?: From Satellite Television to the Internet in the Arab World. 

David Banisar is Director of the Freedom of Information Project of Privacy International in London. He is also a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School and a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Law, University of Leeds. Previously he was a Research Fellow at Information Infrastructure Project at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a co-founder and Policy Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, DC. He has worked in the field of information policy for seventeen years and is the author of books, studies, and articles on freedom of information, freedom of expression, media policy, whistleblowing, communications security, and privacy.

Guy Berger is head of the School of Journalism & Media Studies at Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa. He is editor of the book Media Legislation in Africa (2007), published by UNESCO, and was keynote speaker at a UNESCO conference on Press Freedom and New Media in the same year. In 1995, he founded the Rhodes school's New Media Lab which in turn initiated what has become the world's largest annual gathering of African journalists. In 2008, Berger also raised R8m from the Knight Foundation and MTN towards research into the articulation of cell phones and the media industry. He writes a fortnightly media column for South Africa's leading independent newspaper.

Floriana Fossato has studied Russian literature, politics and society in Italy, Moscow and at University College London and lived and worked in Russia for more than a decade. She was a research associate at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University for the project The Web That Failed: How opposition politics and independent initiatives are failing on the Internet in Russia. Beginning in 2009 she will be involved in a EU funded project on Media in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.

Shanthi Kalathil is an expert on media, civil society, and democratization. She is currently acting as a consultant to the Communication for Governance and Accountability Program (CommGAP) at the World Bank, a new initiative that seeks to explore the role of the public sphere—incorporating plural and independent media systems, the free flow of information, and free debate and discussion—in securing good governance and accountability. She was formerly a senior democracy fellow based in the Office of Democracy and Governance at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where she provided policy and programmatic advice on issues relating to civil society, media, and the Near East/Asia region, and an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she co-authored Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule, a widely cited, reviewed and translated volume on the political effect of the internet. She holds a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is fluent in Mandarin.

Daniel Kimmage received his undergraduate education at the State University of New York at Binghamton and earned an M.A. in Russian and Islamic history from Cornell University. From 1997-2001, Kimmage lived in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he was the English-language editor of the quarterly journal Manuscripta Orientalia at the Institute of Oriental Studies. From 2003 to 2008, Kimmage was a regional analyst at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, where he focused on politics, business, and media issues in Central Asia and Russia. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, Foreign Policy and Slate. He is currently an independent consultant based in Washington, DC.

Sudhir Krishnaswamy is an Assistant Professor at the National Law School of India University. He graduated from the National Law School Bangalore in 1998 and went on to complete the Bachelor in Civil Law and the Doctorate in Philosophy of Law at Oxford University at the University of Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship. His research interests include constitutional and administrative law, property and intellectual property law, legal theory and the reform of legal systems. He is the Chief Editor of the International Journal of Communications Law and Policy and was an editor of the Oxford University Commonwealth Law Journal.

Xiao Qiang is the Director of China Internet Project and an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley. He is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of China Digital Times, a bi-lingual China news website. A theoretical physicist by training, he studied at the University of Science and Technology of China and entered the PhD program (1986-1989) in astrophysics at the University of Notre Dame. He became a full time human rights activist after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. He was the Executive Director of the New York-based NGO Human Rights in China from 1991 to 2002 and vice-chairman of the steering committee of the World Movement for Democracy. He is a recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship in 2001, and is profiled in the book Soul Purpose: 40 People Who Are Changing the World for the Better. He researches and writes about state online censorship and propaganda, emerging "Citizen Blogging" movement, and network activism in Chinese cyberspace.

Katitza Rodríguez is the Director of EPIC´s International Privacy Project and Coordinator of The Public Voice Coalition where she concentrates on comparative policy and legal aspects of privacy and data protection and is in charge of liaising with data protection authorities, policymakers, consumer and civil society organizations around the world. She is also Research Director for the "Privacy and Human Rights Report (PHR) 2008," (forthcoming) the most comprehensive survey of privacy laws and developments in the world. She was responsible for facilitating the participation of Civil Society in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Ministerial in Seoul, Korea as well as the organization of the OECD Civil Society Forum.

Bridget Welsh is associate professor in the Southeast Asia Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University-SAIS. Her primary research interest focuses on 20th century Southeast Asian politics. She is the former chair of the Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei Studies Group and the editor of Reflections: The Mahathir Years (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) and co-editor of Legacy of Engagement in Southeast Asia (Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2008). She is currently completing an analysis of Malaysian voting behavior and the electoral system during the last ten years and a project examining the local dynamics in elections. She received her PhD from the Department of Political Science at Columbia University, and her MA from Columbia University.

Expert Methodology Committee

Jon B. Alterman is director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C (see above for full bio).

Derrick Cogburn is an expert on global information and communication technology (ICT) policy and in the use of ICTs for socio-economic development. He is currently an assistant professor at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies and senior research associate at the Moynihan Institute of Global Affairs at the Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs. He also directs the Collaboratory on Technology Enhanced Learning Communities (Cotelco), an award-winning social science research collaboratory investigating the social and technical factors that influence geographically distributed collaborative knowledge work, particularly between developed and developing countries.  Additionally, he is also a faculty affiliate with the Convergence Center, a member of the Internet Governance Project, and is a faculty member of the Syracuse University Africa Initiative.

Sarah Cook is an Asia researcher at Freedom House and Assistant Editor for the Freedom on the Net index. She has served as assistant to the editor of the 2008 Freedom of the Press index and analyst for both that publication and Freedom in the World. Her research has covered human rights and media developments in East Asia, Indochina, and the Middle East, including recent fact-finding trips to Hong Kong and Taiwan. She has also been a country report author on China for a recent Freedom House publication on the status of freedom of association. Before joining Freedom House, she co-edited the English translation of A China More Just, a memoir by prominent rights attorney Gao Zhisheng, and was twice a delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva for an NGO working on religious freedom in China. She received a B.A. in International Relations from Pomona College and as a Marshall Scholar, completed Masters degrees in Middle East Politics and Public International Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

Robert Guerra is the Project Director of Freedom House's Global Internet Freedom Initiative. The initiative aims to analyze the state of internet freedom, to expand the use of anti-censorship technologies, to build support networks for citizens fighting against online repression and to focus greater international attention on the growing threats to users’ rights. He is also one of the founding directors of Privaterra - an ongoing project of Tides Foundation Canada that works with nongovernmental organizations to assist them with issues of data privacy, secure communications, information security, Internet Governance and internet Freedom. He advises numerous non-profits, foundations and international organizations and is often invited to speak at events to share the challenges being faced by social justice organizations in regards to surveillance, censorship and privacy.

Leslie Harris is the President and CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology where is responsible for the overall vision, direction and management of the organization and serves as the organization’s chief spokesperson. Since joining CDT, she has been involved with a wide range of issues related to civil liberties and the internet, including, government data-mining for counterintelligence, government secrecy, privacy, global internet freedom, intellectual property, data security and internet censorship. She testifies before Congress on issues related to technology, the internet and civil liberties and writes, speaks on internet issues and is regular contributor to several online publications and blogs. She received her law degree from the Georgetown University Law Center and her BA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Shanthi Kalathil is a consultant to the Communication for Governance and Accountability Program (CommGAP) at the World Bank (see above for full bio).

Daniel Kimmage is currently an independent consultant based in Washington, DC and an expert in Russia and Central Asia (see above for full bio).

Karin Deutsch Karlekar is the managing editor of Freedom of the Press, an annual survey that tracks trends in media freedom worldwide and served as managing editor for Freedom on the Net. She coordinates the research, ratings, and editorial processes for the survey, and also writes a number of the country reports. In addition, she has conducted research and assessment missions to Nigeria, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan, and has traveled extensively in Asia and Africa. She regularly serves as the spokesperson for Freedom House on media and press freedom issues, and has been quoted extensively in U.S. and foreign media outlets. For the past five years, she has represented Freedom House in the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) network, and in February 2006 was elected as IFEX Convenor and head of IFEX's governing Council. Prior to joining Freedom House, Dr. Karlekar was a Deputy Editor for the electronic division for the Economist Intelligence Unit and also served as a consultant to Human Rights Watch. She holds a Ph.D. in Indian History from Cambridge University, England.

Christopher Walker is Director of Studies at Freedom House where he helps oversee a team of senior analysts and researchers in devising overall strategy for Freedom House's analytical publications. He is responsible for generating special studies and reports, conducting briefings, and responding to critical news and democracy issues through statements and op-eds. Before joining Freedom House, he worked at the EastWest Institute. He is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Global Affairs at New York University and has contributed to a wide range of publications. He received his undergraduate degree from Binghamton University, State University of New York, and Master's Degree from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.