It assessed military attempts to wage information warfare and analysed the role of mass media in framing and amplifying military conflicts. This session discussed recent examples of communication rights and wrongs in the context of war and peace. It is precisely for this reason that the first thing rulers on the road to war deny are people’s right to communicate freely - be it by censorship, manipulation, restricting access to the means of communication or otherwise - in the interests of national security. But communication - and in particular grassroots network-driven communication - can also be a force for peace building and conflict resolution. Communication propaganda has been used throughout history as a means of justifying military aggression and mass killings - from the middle ages to the genocide in Rwanda to the war in Iraq. The first victim of war is the truth, so goes an old proverb. The session that was convened by APC and hosted by Karen Banks ( APC, London) and Ralf Bendrath (German WSIS Coordination Group, Berlin). At a conference yesterday in the World Forum on Communication Rights, a parallel forum to the official World Summit on the Information Society, speakers from the United States, Colombia, and a Kenyan technologist working in Rwanda took up the theme of how war situations deny communities the right to communicate and how citizens can and are responding to break the silence.