Internet Freedom Fighter Bassel Khartabil
“As long as you people out there are doing what you are doing, my soul is free."
Bassel Khartabil was a Palestinian Syrian open-source software developer "credited with opening up the Internet in Syria and vastly extending online access and knowledge to the Syrian people.”
Chief technology officer and co-founder of collaborative research company Aiki Lab, CTO of Al-Aous, a publishing and research institution dedicated to archaeological sciences and arts in Syria, Bassel also served as project lead and public affiliate for Creative Commons Syria, contributing to Mozilla Firefox, Wikipedia, Openclipart, Fabricatorz, and Sharism.
From March 15, 2012, the one-year anniversary of the Syrian uprising, he was detained by the Syrian government at Adra Prison in Damascus.
In August 2017, it was revealed that Khartabil had been executed by the Syrian regime shortly after his disappearance in 2015.
[bio condensed from Wikipedia.]
photo by Joi Ito, released under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License