Knight Center director Eric Freedman recently spoke at Yale Law School’s Center for Global Legal Challenges.
His talk, “Suppressing Cyber-dissent and the Limits of Human Rights Activism,” addressed how new communications technologies provide tools for almost anyone to become a publisher or broadcaster to disseminate news, information and opinion – even politically dangerous news , information and opinion. Those technologies also provide tools for authoritarian regimes to identify and punish cyber-dissenters.
He said experiences in the former Soviet Union, China, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere demonstrate the limited impact of efforts by human rights and free expression NGOs to effectively protest or reverse regime measures to silence cyber-critics, raising serious questions about how to increase their effectiveness.
The guest lecture was part of the Foreign Affairs in the Internet Age series organized by the Yale Law School Information Society Project.

Environmental Crises in Central Asia: From Steppes to Seas, from Deserts to Glaciers has just been published by Routledge as part of its Studies in Environmental Communication and Media series.

The editors are Knight Center director Eric Freedman and Mark Neuzil, a journalism professor at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and a past guest speaker at the Knight Center.
The book explores an array of environmental challenges in a strategically crucial part of the globe, including the impact of climate change on glacial melt, desertification, deforestation, destruction of biodiversity, hazardous wastes, water quality and supply, energy exploration, air and pesticide pollution, and environmental diseases.
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Can Western news organizations help fill the environmental news and information gap left by local media in the three former Soviet republics in the South Caucasus — Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia?
Maybe in part, but there are still many news holes left unfilled. And the impact of foreign media coverage is uncertain in a region where press rights are ignored, where governments often are opaque and where those governments are reluctant to spend money to remedy environmental woes.
All three countries rank poorly in press freedom ratings from such organizations as Reporters without Borders and Freedom House, with Azerbaijan among the world’s worst-of-the-worst.
Those are some of the conclusions in a new study by Knight Center director Eric Freedman, research director Bruno Takahashi, former doctoral research assistant Christine Carmichael and University of St. Thomas journalism professor Mark Neuzil, who has been a Knight Center guest lecturer.
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