Social reform is making another twitter scourge in efforts to change social policy, this time in the hard pressed conservative backdrop of Saudi Arabian society.

The movement is called Women2Drive on twitter and it is making quite the grass root stir amongst Saudi women who, by law, are not allowed to drive and must hire a male chauffer or find a male relative to drive them.  Sick and tired of what many women view as an unnecessary social injustice, a few brave women with foreign drivers permits took to the roads and filmed their protest on youtube for a call to more action.

In Saudi society, conservative men have viewed driving as a hazard to women with one cleric going as far to say that the position women are put in while driving could damage their ovaries.

The breaking of the ban is not considered to be a full out protest since it does not involved gatherings, rallies or procession of cars. Protest are inherently illegal in Saudi Arabia.

Women2Drive has resulted so far in five women posting youtube videos of themselves driving and with the campaign gaining leverage, the Saudi government reacted by setting up check points and increasing traffic patrols. Meanwhile, the official website of the campaign was hacked and displayed a background of image of an ominous red lighting bolt stating “Reason for the hacking: I am against women driving in the land of the two holy shrines.”

Both the upgrades in traffic patrols and the website hacking in my opinion serve to boaster the legitimacy of the movement and give the movement more wide spread notoriety. That argument is also reflected in that fact that three women in the Shoura Council, which advises the government on policy said the Transportation Ministry should consider letting women drive just this month.

Here, I think social change through cyberspace tools may once again be possible if carefully done, since the objective is specific and the concession is a relatively small one compared to other problems which people could choose to protest over. Even some Saudi newspapers have allowed editorials to be published that were  pro-women driving which says that this particular issue is a salient national issue that can not only be challenged by an independent movement, but by forces that have more creditability inside Saudi Arabian culture.

Meanwhile other activists have taken to YOUTUBE with a more  humorous approach, the key video being called “No Woman, No Drive.”

In the freedom of western democracies, the issue of internet neutrality is an important and crucial notion that is coming under increasing threat, as both companies and governments begin to strengthen their grip on our cyberspace freedoms.

The basic idea of internet neutrality is that users should have the ability to access any web content they chose, use any applications they choose free of restrictions or limitations their internet service provider may impose. In addition, Berkley adds “that no bit of information should be prioritized over another.  This principle implies that an information network such as the internet is most efficient and useful to the public when it is less focused on a particular audience and instead attentive to multiple users.”

Like China, the use of censorship could impose a threat to internet neutrality, but in many ways unlike China, the threat of blocking or prioritizing content could come from internet services providers in the west of their own free choice, and unknown to many people this is happening in democratic countries. Internet providers themselves have the ability to, prioritize or block, or even slow content to giver their services an advantage over others.

Legally, there have already been cases filed in regards to the idea and freedom of internet neutrality. In 2005, the US Federal Communications Commission actually sanctioned a rural telephone company named Madison River Communications for blocking its DSL customers from making phone calls over the internet. The industry has a whole argues that it should be able to block anything which may infringe on the broad and vague term of “quality of service.” In theory this could mean that a provider may chose to block a search engine like “Yahoo” or “Google” in favor of its own.

The industry also argues that upstarts like Facebook, Google and Yahoo have taken advantage of internet service providers capital infrastructure to make billions of dollars. The incoming AT&T CEO  went as far as saying that upstarts like Google would like to “use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it.”

Just this year a landmark net neutrality court case tested open internet rules, with Verizon bringing a federal court case against Federal Communications Commission. Verizon argued that the Federal Communications Commission lacks the authority to enforce the rules they established and that provisions established by the FCC violate the companies first amendment rights of free speech.

Cases like these should bring and keep the important debate and issue of  internet neutrality  alive and well. Organizations in both the United States and Canada have websites devoted to the cause and public knowledge of the cause. The public must continue to be informed on this issue as the world progresses onto the new terrain of cyberspace. Otherwise the freedom of content could easily be endangered.This is especially important since private companies which can consolidate so much power and influence are rapidly moving into cyberspace and will attempt to create their own advantages in the name of profit while challenging the intellectual and user freedoms of netizens across North America.

While it is encouraging to see court cases like the 2013 Verizon case light up this issue in the public sphere, much more action needs to be done to inform the public of what the idea of net neutrality really is, the impact it has on all of us, and the threat it is now under.

The news regarding United States surveillance programs and potential to violate privacy continues to show the tip of the ice burg. The Edward Snowden case has revealed new questionable abuses of power by the NSA.

Facebook and the phenomenon of social media, where many of us post our thoughts, photos, check in locations, plan events, and make connections, is now part of The NSA espionage tactics as revealed the week of September 28th 2013. It appears that NSA uses massive collections of electronic data to create a graphic analysis of some American citizen’s social connections, which includes travel, location, associates, as well as Facebook.

Even Mark Zuckerberg reacted to the revelations  with NBC summarizing his point of view that “revelations about U.S. government surveillance hurt users’ trust in Internet companies and that knowing more about the programs would help relieve some of the public concerns.”

There are growing and relevant concerns about the NSA prying into our communications and social media. Foremost among then is the potential for abuse and Facebook, with its ability to illustrate a picture of persons life, past, present and future, as well as the converging amount of personal information, definitely seems like a paramount target for abuse.

As also reported by NBC News, revelations recently surfaced that NSA employees were actively abusing their power and privileges by spying on the communications of their significant others, completely violating their own work agenda and proper conduct to use their tools in order to spy on terrorist suspects and international criminals.

Again, this raises the question of how far governments are willing to go, and how easily people in power can give into the temptations that come with power. It’s likely that spying on significant others is more wide spread than what has been revealed by the NSA and in any case, the public’s privacy continues to be undermined, questioned and most likely abused.

People should also question what information companies like Facebook are willing to sell or give the government as well as private entities.Perhaps the more ominous question is if the country or world were induced into a state of emergency or another 9/11 like attacked occurred, how many people would become innocent victims of the onslaught of privacy? Would people be detained on partial or circumstantial evidence based on Facebook connections?

The public should be questioning both the United States government and Facebook in regards to privacy, transparency and their right especially at time when so much information is coming forth because if left unchecked, personal privacy make become a victim of circumstance at the cost of many whether innocent or guilty.