Route to revolution

March 23rd, 2011

Digital activism has long been a way of life in Egypt; from monitoring political corruption to protesting against police brutality
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Cracks widening in Egypt’s internet wall  

January 31st, 2011

As Egypt enters a seventh day of open revolt against the rule of President Hosni Mubarak, the country’s internet access continues to be largely shut down. That extended closure is one of the clearest signs that Mubarak still sees this as a fight he can win.

The longer the internet shutdown continues, the more and more mysterious the government’s thinking becomes. The last week has proven not only that the protesters don’t need Twitter and Facebook access to challenge the system but also that the world’s media don’t necessarily need it to bring details, images and even videos of this mass revolt to the world.

Each day brings new evidence of the complete futility of the gesture. Prominent local bloggers and online activists are simply calling friends overseas to tweet details on their behalf, the flood of journalists entering the country are almost all coming in armed with Thuraya satellite phones and Bgan receivers that enable you to get online from anywhere.

At this point, it’s likely that the main victim of the government’s online blockade will be the Egyptian economy. The country’s banks and stock market were shut down on Monday and the overall economic damage from the government’s decision to cut Egypt off from the world is something that will be hard to measure for a while.

Yesterday I met up with a prominent blogger and digital activist who blogs and tweets under the name of Sandmonkey. He gleefully told me that cracking the internet blockade was becoming an international cause célèbre for the international digital expression community. There were plans afoot, he said, for a group of “hardcore open source guys from Germany” to arrive here with satellite phones and all the equipment they needed to set up a local internet network completely beyond the reach of the authorities.

“They’re going to bypass the whole system,” he told me.

Egypt’s Twitter-less revolution

January 29th, 2011

The Egyptian government has cut mobile telephone and internet services, Index on Censorship’s Egypt regional editor Ashraf Khalil reports on how the information vacuum affected yesterday’s “day of rage”

The cell phones started working this morning again, although I’m not sure they’ll stay that way. The internet (as of 7pm local time) was still blocked. The fact that one but not the other has been restored perhaps indicates that the government views the internet as a larger threat than phone calls and text messages.

Whatever the logic, it’s worth noting that all these government attempts to restrict communications did very little to hinder the protesters yesterday and today.

The #Jan25 Day of Rage that kicked off the current waves of civil unrest rocking President Hosni Mubarak’s government DID employ Facebook, Twitter and text messaging as crucial tools. Last minute notifications on where to gather went out electronically at first. And all through the day on 25 January, protesters used Twitter to coordinate, offer each other encouragement and get news about protests happening elsewhere. When clashes happened in Suez or Alexandria, the protesters in Tahrir instantly knew and took heart from it. If there was thousands fighting to reach the square, they knew that too.

But if protests on 25 January took place in the context of a veritable flood of information, yesterday’s massive demonstrations happened in a literal vacuum. Suddenly dragged back to the landline communications era, the protesters didn’t know about Alexandria or Suez; they didn’t even know what was happening across the river.

It didn’t matter. Protest organisers basically bypassed the idea of coordination altogether and just told people “Protest everywhere.”

In anything, the information vacuum may have ended up sharpening the wills of the demonstrators. With no idea of the situation anywhere else in Egypt, protesters had no choice by to fight like hell for whatever public patch of ground they were standing on—and then fight their way through to the next patch of ground.

All through the day Friday and deep into the night, Cairo seemed to have reverted to a word-of-mouth storyteller society. If you were walking in the street and you saw protesters coming from the other direction, you asked them where they were coming from and what the situation was like there.

The shutdown also didn’t manage to stop the world’s media from effectively conveying the story to the world. Correspondents generally found a way to get online or, in many cases, reverted to the old-school practice of dictating their stories and notes to the newsroom over a landline.

Perhaps the largest impact was that many photographers and videographers have amazing images and footage trapped on their cameras with no way to get them out. I personally know several people in this situation.

When the government does finally lift the country-wide internet blockade, look for an absolute flood of imagery to instantly start flowing.

Read Ashraf Khalil’s “Uncut” blog here

Index Eyewitness: Cairo

January 28th, 2011

Despite the information shutdown in Egypt, Index on Censorship’s Egypt regional editor Ashraf Khalil has filed this exclusive report from today’s anti-government protests in Cairo
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Egyptian blogger released after four years in jail

November 17th, 2010

Kareem Amer freed after serving a prison term for insulting Islam and defaming Egypt’s president. Ashraf Khalil reports
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Egypt tightens the screw

October 29th, 2010

Political uncertainty pushes the government to roll recent free speech gains and muzzle independent voices. Ashraf Khalil asks, will Facebook be next?
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