Early years Nawaat was co-founded by
Sami Ben Gharbia, Sufian Guerfali and
Riadh Guerfali. The site went online on April 5, 2004, as a forum for Tunisian citizens and diaspora to be able to express themselves free of censorship from the government of
Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali. Since its launch, the site has posted thousands of print and visual media items focused on human rights, freedom of the press, politics, and culture in
Tunisia, primarily through the
French and
Arabic languages but also frequently with
English language contributions. The
Ben Ali government established the
Tunisian Internet Agency (ATI) in 1996 to monitor all
Internet communications within the borders of Tunisia. Because of Nawaat's frequent challenges to the Tunisian government's restrictions on
Internet communications, it became the target of ATI censors shortly after its inception. ATI would block users' attempts to access Nawaat with Smartfilter software manufactured by the United States company
Secure Computing, displaying a standard
404 "File Not Found" error message on their web browsers. In addition, Nawaat aggregated a variety of commentaries exploring the role of
Islam in government and contemporary relations between Arab nations and the Western world. Nawaat also featured contributions from human rights advocates from the Arab world as well as
Iran and other nations with large Muslim populations. The site's staff often wrote opinion pieces castigating Arab governments with harsh censorship laws or promoting anti-censorship initiatives. The editors also called regularly for the release of imprisoned free-speech advocates including
Alaa Abd El-Fattah and Abdel Monem Mahmoud.
Coverage of self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi and Sidi Bouzid riots Mohamed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, set himself on fire on December 17, 2010, resulting in his eventual death on January 4, 2011. This event catalyzed a series of street protests starting in the town of
Sidi Bouzid that became the Tunisian Revolution. Nawaat provided commentary which contextualized the unfolding events and posted numerous articles about the unfolding events, which many Tunisians were able to access via mirror sites and other conduits. Nawaat covered the spread of protests until
Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali fled the country with his family, posting news stories from international news sources, Arab journalists, and Tunisians inside the country and abroad. The site kept the focus on the underlying causes of the revolution as well, including restrictions on personal freedoms, imprisonment of opposition members, and economic stagnation.
TuniLeaks Tunileaks was launched on November 28 on Nawaat.org, one hour after the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks unleashed cables on Tunisia. The first release contained 17 cables issued from the US Embassy in Tunisia, and the majority of them revealed exchanges between the embassy and the US State Department. Those revelations mainly dealt with the neglect of human rights in Tunisia and the restrictions on freedom of expression. The Tunisian government rapidly blocked access to TuniLeaks, first blocking https://web.archive.org/web/20150221084506/https://tunileaks.appspot.com/ (without the https), then on the next day blocked Google App Engine's IP Address (209.85.229.141) in order to block Tunileaks under https as well. Additionally, the electronic version of Al Akhbar, a Lebanese newspaper, was also censored in Tunisia for containing some cables released by Tunileaks.
Other support to revolution One of Nawaat's innovative contributions during the revolution was identifying and translating videos and personal accounts of potential media interest that were distributed on
Facebook and other social networking sites. By the time of Ben Ali's ouster, Facebook was one of the few sites not blocked by the government where protesters could post the accounts of the revolution. The
Tunisian dialect in the sites' videos made them unintelligible to many native speakers of
Arabic, and the Nawaat staff's translation efforts resulted in many videos of protests and Tunisian security service crackdowns being broadcast on
Al-Jazeera and other international news outlets. Nawaat and its affiliates made utilized the
Posterous blogging platform to distribute material to the international press. Al-Jazeera had been banned from the country by the
Ben Ali government and the videos provided by Nawaat were one of the most reliable sources of valuable video footage during the revolution. The Nawaat staff created the first Tunisian
Hackerspace, a space where collaborative Internet technology projects can be discussed among members of the Arab Internet activist community along with worldwide partners.
Hackerspace initiatives have included promotion of
Arabic language Wikimedia proliferation.
Nawaatleaks On March 27, 2014, Nawaat.org launched an anonymous
whistleblowing initiative in order to support transparency and spot corruption. The initiative is based on the
GlobaLeaks platform and the
Tor technology and accessible in Arabic and French. In collaboration with GlobaLeaks, the Nawaat team created a special page that deploys a number of open source applications and techniques which protect those leaking confidential documents and files. This software even protects whistleblowers from the Nawaat team itself, which thanks to these techniques will not be able to identify the identity of those who leak information through their address emails, IP addresses, names or their geographic locations. To provide them with further protection, the Nawaat team will as usual and before the publication of any leaked confidential document, delete all meta data which increases the possibility of identifying the electronic source of documents in its different formats: audio, video clips, photos or texts. ==Facts and figures==