Cameran Ashraf is head of Human Rights at the Wikimedia Foundation, an assistant professor at the School of Public Policy, Central European University, and co-founder of international human rights and technology organization AccessNow. In recognition of his work, the European Parliament selected AccessNow as a finalist for the 2010 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, the European Union’s highest human rights honor.

In 2009 he assembled a team providing digital security to the threatened activists, journalists, and vital leadership websites during Iran’s Green Movement, “”the first major world event broadcast worldwide almost entirely via social media””. Cameran and his team defended critical Green Movement websites from state-sponsored attacks, provided personal communications security for hundreds of vulnerable in-country activists and journalists, distributed proxy servers used by over 40,000 Iranians daily, facilitated more than 3 million protest video downloads from inside Iran, and played a key role in connecting millions worldwide to the peaceful protests. This work led Cameran to co-found AccessNow, one of the world’s largest international human rights organizations dedicated to defending and extending digital rights.