On World Press Freedom Day, A Look at New Media's Double-Edged Sword

By: Tim Karr | PBS

“If you want to liberate a society,” Egyptian Arab Spring activist Wael Ghonim said early in the year, “just give them the Internet.”  

In retrospect, Ghonim should have qualified his statement to include the kind of Internet free societies need. For as online organizing has spread across the Middle East and North Africa, governments have heightened efforts to remake digital networks as tools of censorship and surveillance.