As pressure increases on western governments to bring an end to the bloodshed in Syria, "non-lethal" assistance has become the promise of the hour. The term is ubiquitous, cropping up in White House press briefings and the European Union's arms embargo on Syria.

Yet despite the pervasive nature of the term, it does not yet have a widely accepted legal definition. Broadly speaking, it is used to describe equipment and intelligence that cannot be directly used to kill. This can encompass anything from helmets and body armor to more facilitative assistance such as encrypted radios and satellite imagery. In practice, the lines between non-lethal equipment and its lethal counterparts are more blurred. In fact, both are required for a soldier to maximize the use of his weapon. As Pieter Wezeman, a senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, points out, "a guy with a helmet and a radio is more likely to use his gun effectively because his protection increases his survivability and his radio [improves] his targeting through better communication."

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On the top floor of a towering apartment block in Cairo, half a dozen Syrian activists are hunched over their laptops. Each man organized demonstrations in his home town before escaping the Assad regime's intelligence agents in the last few months. Now, armed with a list of trusted contacts that stretches across the borders from southwest Syria to Lebanon and Jordan, they have become a key link in the supply chain of an opposition movement that is struggling to outmaneuver a brutal crackdown. Donations collected from Syrians and well-wishers in Cairo are used to purchase cell phones, satellite communications equipment, medicine, and money, which is smuggled to friends and family members on the inside. In turn, protesters send out video evidence of attacks, which the men in Cairo catalogue, upload to YouTube, and forward to media outlets.

The men work with close contacts in their own villages and neighborhoods, independently of organizing committees or opposition bodies. Abdel Youssef fled from Ad Dumayr, a city northeast of Damascus. Syrian authorities went door to door there searching for military defectors on Wednesday night and he spent the day following their movements through eyewitness accounts. As he tells the story of how he fled, a Skype window flashes up on his screen. A woman he knows tells him that security forces attempting to arrest a man have captured his daughter instead. "Now I'm looking out the window," the message reads. "She is being beaten up by the security forces because she is saying ‘Allahu Akhbar'." Abdel Youssef passes on information like this to a contact in the Free Syrian Army, who he says use this information to block roads and set up ambushes in an attempt to protect demonstrations.

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Armed security officers wearing balaclavas led Nasser Abul, blindfolded and shackled, into a courtroom in downtown Kuwait City on July 19. Accused of crimes against the state, he answered the judge's questions from a wood-and-metal cage in the courtroom. His mother, watching the proceedings, hoped her 26-year-old eldest son would finally be released after nearly two months in detention. The judiciary has refused to grant her wish.

Abul found himself in jail because of a few tweets. Twitter was wildly popular in Kuwait even before protests began in Tunis and Cairo, and its use in Kuwait surged as the Arab Spring provided daily inspiration for news updates and commentary. Between January and March, people in Kuwait wrote over 3.69 million tweets -- more than any other country in the Middle East, according to a June report by the Dubai School of Government.

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CAIRO — Most of the world got a crash course in the Egyptian opposition movement this month, as mass protests broke out on the streets of Cairo. From all appearances, the movement emerged organically in the wake of the overthrow of the government in nearby Tunisia, as hundreds of thousands of angry citizens turned out to demand President Hosni Mubarak immediately step down. Several days after the marches began, former International Atomic Energy Agency chief and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohamed ElBaradei arrived on the scene to give the marchers in the streets a nominal leader and media-savvy public face. And shortly after that, Egypt's largest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, joined in, lending its political heft to the movement.

But the groundwork for the Egyptian uprising was set well before these high-profile figures and organizations became involved. Nearly three years ago, a group of youth activists with a strong sense of Internet organizing and more than a little help from abroad was preparing for a grassroots, high-tech opposition movement.

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An interesting discussion has already broken out over whether Tunisia should be considered a "Twitter Revolution" -- a far more interesting and relevant discussion than whether it was a "WikiLeaks Revolution" (it wasn't). I've seen some great points already by Ethan Zuckerman, Evgeny Morozov, Luke Allnut, Jillian York, and others. I'm looking forward to being one of the social scientists digging into the data, where I suspect that both enthusiasts and skeptics will find support for their arguments. For now, I would just argue that it would be more productive to focus more broadly on the evolution of the Arab media over the last decade, in which new media such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, forums and blogs work together with satellite television stations such as Al Jazeera to collectively transform the Arab information environment and shatter the ability of authoritarian regimes to control the flow of information, images, ideas and opinions. That feels like a sentence which I've written a hundred times over the last decade… and one which has never felt truer than the last month in Tunisia.

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On June 6, a pair of police officers entered an Alexandria Internet cafe and began asking for the identification documents of everyone present. When 28-year-old Khaled Said objected to being searched without a warrant, the officers began to attack him, beating his head against a table and kicking him in the chest. They tied his hands behind his back and dragged him to a nearby building where they continued to smash his head, first against an iron door and then against the building's marble steps. Witnesses heard Khaled begging them to stop, screaming "I'm going to die," to which the officers responded: "You're going to die anyway." The officers dragged Said into their police car and drove him away, only to return several minutes later to leave his lifeless corpse in the street.

The Ministry of Interior immediately attempted to blame the gruesome incident on "drugs": The young man had died when he choked on a joint he was trying to hide as he was approached by the police. Any injuries sustained -- his fractured skull, dislocated jaw, mangled face -- were the result of his resisting arrest, they claimed.  The bloodied pictures of the victim from the morgue, widely circulated on Facebook and through other networks, were likewise dismissed. Outrage has built across Egyptian political society, culminating in today's massive demonstrations in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria. Protesters were assaulted and "kidnapped" by security officers in plainclothes from amongst the crowds in a well-orchestrated but unsuccessful attempt on the part of Ministry of Interior officials to make the incident go away.

The Khaled Said case has offered a graphic demonstration of the emptiness of the pledge by the government of Egypt when it renewed the country's decades-long period of emergency 'aw that it would limit its application to terrorism and drug-related crimes. Khaled Said's brutal murder is a chilling reminder of what emergency law -- and Interior Ministry impunity -- means for Egyptians. Frustration with that impunity is what leads protesters to take to the streets.

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As the one-year anniversary of Iran's June 12 election approaches, the feeling on the ground, at least in major cities, is that the current political and economic situation cannot continue. Although many people are disappointed that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remains in power and that the groups behind the coup continue to try to increase their political and economic hold on the country, the general feeling is that "There is fire under the ash," as we say in Persian. In other words, the popular rage and fury over the rigged election and the use of violence and rape and the popular demands for change remain. Any spark can set this fire off once again. The coup government knows only too well, judging by its own actions.   

Surprisingly, despite the disturbing news of more arrests and continued use of torture, there is a general relative sense of optimism that we are witnessing the slow, gradual breakdown of the Ahmadinejad government. For Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Moussavi, the first anniversary is important in as much as it underscores the fact that despite the most pessimistic predictions, the Green Movement is still a force seriously threatening the coup government. At the same time, unlike some Iranian diaspora figures who predicted a quick demise of the Islamic Republic in the months after the June, 2009 presidential elections, Karroubi and Moussavi understand that they and the Green Movement are involved in a relatively protracted struggle to achieve their goals. Both men are confident of their ultimate victory.

As someone who is living in Iran, it is important to counter the many myths that are often perpetuated in the West.

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