David Keyes is the Executive Director[1] of Advancing Human Rights and co-founder[2] of CyberDissidents.org. He served as coordinator for democracy programs under Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky and assisted a former UN ambassador.[3] Keyes has written for leading publications including The Wall Street Journal,[4] Reuters,[5] The New Republic, and The Daily Beast[6] and has appeared on MSNBC,[7] Al Hurra,[8] PBS,[9] Bloomberg TV[10] and Voice of America.[11] He has spoken in the US Congress, United Nations,[12] Italian Parliament,[13] and Google. Keyes has met with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President George W. Bush. [14]
Keyes’ work in support of democracy has received high praise from Natan Sharansky,[15] Bob Boorstin, the head of policy at Google,[16] and the Human Rights Watch founder, Robert L. Bernstein.[17] In 2010, Keyes and Bernstein partnered to found Advancing Human Rights and now share an office in New York.[17] Bernstein has called AHR “the most important thing I’ve done in my life.”
In the run up to the 2011 Arab Spring, Keyes wrote extensively about increasing repression of bloggers and the instability of Arab dictatorships.[18] On 25 January 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable,"[19] One day later, Keyes was asked by a journalist what Obama should do about Egypt. "Tell Secretary of State Clinton to stop talking about how stable the Egyptian regime is,"[20] he replied. Two weeks later, the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak fell.
According to PBS,[21] Keyes sparked a protest movement in Turkey following his call in The Wall Street Journal[22] for the removal of the country’s YouTube ban. Shortly after his article, the ban was lifted. Keyes also created the First Annual Saudi Women’s Grand Prix which was signed by a former US National Security Adviser, former head of CIA, former ambassador to the EU, European parliamentarians and the first woman to drove in the Indianapolis 500 and Daytona 500 among others. It received wide coverage in the press[7] and gathered signatures from dozens of countries.[23]