“Now everyone can see what’s happening in the police stations. That’s something that touches a nerve in ordinary citizens who are not political activists,” Abbas says. One Egyptian online activist created the ‘piggipedia’, a Flickr account showing a gallery of senior Egyptian police officers photographed at demonstrations.

The murder of Khaled Said in Alexandria last June became a new rallying point for protest, after he was beaten to death in public, in front of witnesses, by plain-clothes police officers. Autopsy photographs of his badly battered face circulated immediately on the internet, sparking a month-long round of demonstrations and vigils – many of which were organized and announced on Facebook and Twitter. The Facebook group ‘We are all Khalid Said’ later became a hub for the January uprising.

The internet was already well established as a virtual meeting point for evading the country’s harsh laws against political activism under President Hosni Mubarak. In 2008, a 30-year-old civil engineer named Ahmed Maher created a Facebook group called the 6 April Movement to commemorate the date of a violent clash between police forces and a group of striking textile factory workers in the Nile Delta city of Mahalla al Kubra. The page then took on a life of its own, gathering more than 70,000 members and expanding beyond labour activism to encompass all manner of political activity. “We can’t have a proper headquarters. It’s not like we can just rent an office,” Maher says. “But on the net there are groups like ours meeting 24 hours a day.”

Last March, employees at the popular online news site Islam Online went on a mass strike to protest against editorial interference by the site’s management. The strike was broadcast over the internet thanks to a live feed on Bambuser, the video-streaming website. In addition to documenting the chants and vigils, many strikers used the streaming video feed to give testimonials directly to viewers.

Before the uprising in January, active bloggers such as Ahmed Maher and Wael Abbas were shifting their energies to Twitter and other online platforms. The appeal, they say, is a new level of interactivity and the creation of a virtual community. Abbas, in particular, has employed his Twitter account in a novel way. After years of posting videos that embarrassed the government, he would be detained, questioned and searched while leaving or arriving in Egypt. On at least one occasion, the authorities confiscated his laptop. As a result, whenever Abbas headed to the airport, he would tweet the news to his 5,000 followers. If he was detained or questioned, he would tweet that as well and the Egyptian online community would immediately rally behind him. In early February, as the Tahrir Square uprising was entering its second week, Abbas was arrested, questioned and released.

The parliamentary elections last year were the first to receive digital scrutiny. Anyone following #egyelections on Twitter was deluged with information from the estimated 44,000 polling stations spread across 29 governorates. Activists, journalists and election monitors all posted and forwarded the latest updates and pictures from around the country. If a monitor or a journalist was turned away from a polling station by police, the incident was instantly posted or tweeted. When Sobhi Saleh, a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated MP, was attacked in Alexandria, the news circulated through Twitter so fast that journalists and human  rights workers were able to interview him in hospital.

“When a new report came in from our reporters in the field, the first thing I would do is put up feeds on our Twitter account, before I even posted the news on the website,” says Lina Attalah, co-managing editor of the English edition of al Masry al Youm , Egypt’s largest independent daily newspaper.

President Hosni Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic party won more than 90 per cent of the vote in a victory that generated widespread condemnation and allegations of voter intimidation, strong-arm tactics and old-fashioned ballot box stuffing. The electronic evidence posted on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube amounted to a damning and comprehensive dossier of the day’s injustices.

Until the uprising in January, activists like Maher and Abbas would express frustration at the inability of Egypt’s robust internet political scene to translate into mass demonstrations. Most Egyptian protests would still amount to the same group of people invariably surrounded by central security riot police. But that’s all history now.

This article is taken from the current issue of Index on Censorship magazine, The Net Effect. Click here to subscribe

The post Route to revolution appeared first on Index on Censorship.

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.

The post Cracks widening in Egypt’s internet wall   appeared first on Index on Censorship.

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

The post Egypt’s Twitter-less revolution appeared first on Index on Censorship.

The protest was large from the beginning — at least 5,000 people, and probably more. The chants started as soon as prayers ended, around 1:30. Protesters marched through Mohandessin, completely shutting down a major road. The crowd seemed to grow steadily as the march continued.

Thanks to the blanket communications shutdown, the protests today took place in an information vacuum. On Tuesday, even during the demonstration, everybody was checking twitter both to coordinate and for news on what was happening across the country. This time nobody knew what was happening anywhere else — not even on the other side of the river in Tahrir Square.

Security forces were present in small numbers, but didn’t attempt to hinder the marchers. They marched unmolested for close to an hour until they arrived at Galaa Square, where the Galaa bridge is the first of two bridges that cross the Nile and lead to Tahrir Square.

The mood was defiant, and even a little festive. People could tell right away that they had achieved a major turnout and presumed that the same was happening elsewhere around the city. They felt like they had the advantage and the momentum. People watching from balconies cheered and waved Egyptian flags. I saw one elderly woman flashing them the V for victory sign.

Security forces had set up their cordon at the mouth of the Bridge, parking four large green police vans side by side, so that they blocked the entire bridge.

That area became the sight of an hour long battle. Security forces used lots of tear gas, indiscriminately. Some of it enveloped the Giza Sheraton, which overlooks the square. The firing was indiscriminate. One tear gas cannister landed on the balcony of a nearby apartment, starting a fire; another landed in the passenger seat of a security forces van parked off to the side, starting another fire.

After the first couple volleys of tear gas, a debate broke out on a side street where people had fled on whether to abandon peaceful tactics. One angry young guy with streaming eyes was furious. People were trying to calm him down. He shouted: “Peaceful? Are you serious? After this?!”

The young man, who would only identify himself as “an Egyptian citizen” told me: “I expect the government to fall today. There will be bodies in the streets, but it will fall.

“I have a degree in information technology and for the last three years I’m sitting at home without a job.”

Some of the crowd came well prepared. Swimming goggles and surgical masks soaked in vinegar, pieces of onion to hold under their noses to reduce the effect of the gas. And bottles of Pepsi — which I discovered today magically reduces the burning in your eyes.

Several times the crowd fell back from the tear gas. Several people were overcome by it. But they always regrouped and charged back. A local supermarket refused to open its doors to protestors but the manager agreed to pass out supplies of vinegar, water and onions. One lady, in response of protestor appeals, dropped a huge bag of onions down to them.

An angry veiled woman in her 50s told me: “We don’t have an agenda. We only want the fall of the regime and all of its symbols. We’re not the Brotherhood and not the Wafd Party. We’re simply against oppression and corruption. This is a failed regime”

Just before 3pm, the Central Security ranks guarding the mouth of the Galaa Bridge gave up and fell back — leaving their four huge trucks in the hand of the protestors. Gleeful youth crawled all over the vehicles, two of them holding up an Egyptian flag from the roof and others spray-painting “down with Hosni Mubarak” on the side. There was a bizarre scene for a while on the bridge where a few remaining Central Security guards were kind of lingering around their trucks looking bewildered and being completely ignored by the protestors. The police officers looked confused and depressed.

Some of the crowd decided to stay in Galaa Square and make sure they held it so that security couldn’t close ranks behind them.

An older man shouted: “It’s better if we control multiple places than just gather in Tahrir where they can bottle us up.”

Lots of others did move on toward Tahrir, crossing the island of Zamalek.

On the other side a major battle was already taking place half way across the Kasr El Nil Bridge — which is the final gateway into the square.

This was a much more violent scene, on both sides. About 2,000 protesters threw rocks and security forces, fired rubber bullets — a spray of little pellets that dig under your skin. I saw several protesters coming back with blood streaming from their faces.

One shouted: “Throw more rocks. Two more hours of this and they’ll collapse.”

A massive volley of tear gas and rubber bullets drove the crowd off of the bridge and back to Zamalek. People fled and eventually regrouped back in Galaa Square, 10 minutes away. There, right around 5 pm, something amazing happened. About 3,000 protestors were still holding the square. Suddenly huge crowds of marchers appeared from two different directions. Reinforcements. Each stream of marchers looked to be about 5,000 strong.

One of them told me they had come from Giza Square and had been fighting their own running battles and had finally broken through the security lines. Their arrival was a huge morale boost. As I was leaving a new cry was going up: “To Tahrir!”

One protester said: “It’s over, finished. This is the beginning of the end [for Mubarak]”

Read Ashraf Khalil’s “Uncut” blog here

The post Index Eyewitness: Cairo appeared first on Index on Censorship.

Amer’s four-year jail sentence actually ended on 5 November, but the Egyptian authorities held on to him for nearly two weeks extra — prompting protests from Amnesty International and others. The Egyptian government — which grants itself sweeping powers under the so-called “emergency laws”— has a history of acting in defiance of its own judiciary. This includes openly ignoring court-ordered releases, or releasing a suspect and then immediately re-arresting him.

So the delay in Amer’s release had supporters worried that the police would simply keep him indefinitely.

Amer was sentenced to four years in prison in 2007, having already served two years in custody, for a package of charges that include insulting Islam, encouraging sedition and defaming President Hosni Mubarak.

His crimes: a series of blog posts that bluntly expressed his atheist beliefs and his criticism of the state of Islamic discourse. His case has already prompted a long-running solidarity campaign by supporters who consider him a “political prisoner”“, guilty of nothing more than thought crime.

Amer has made no public statements since his release. According his supporters, he has requested a bit of quiet and privacy with his family. It remains to be seen whether he will renew his writings, or whether the Egyptian police — particularly the notorious Alexandria contingent — will leave him alone.

Ashraf Khalil is a regional editor at Index on Censorship and a senior reporter for Al Masry Al Youm English Edition

The post Egyptian blogger released after four years in jail appeared first on Index on Censorship.

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

It’s an unfamiliar feeling in a country where politics is generally plodding, stage-managed and extremely predictable. The latest evidence of that uncertainty: a multi-level government push to tighten its control of information.

The past month has witnessed a number of incidents that analysts and activists say amount to a comprehensive effort to roll back limits on freedom of expression and muzzle independent voices.

First came the abrupt cancellation of two popular public affairs television talkshows, one of them featuring maverick journalist Ibrahim Eissa. Then came Eissa’s abrupt firing as editor in chief of the daily newspaper Al-Dostour. Eissa was fired by the paper’s brand new owners, just days after prophetically writing that the government would begin targeting troublesome journalists more extensively.

Blogger Baheyya, an anonymous but deeply respected commentator on the Egyptian political scene, wrote at the time that, “The regime’s goal is clear: to control the flow of political information at an exceptionally sensitive time, limiting the public’s exposure to alternative constructions of political reality.”

Eissa himself said in a television interview (in Arabic here) that the government “requires total silence” and “a return to where we were in 2004” before the explosion in independent media and the efforts of the Kefaya movement succeeded in pushing through longstanding redlines.

Within days came more government actions. The broadcast licenses of 12 satellite channels, most of them religiously themed—were cancelled. A government statement declared that the channels were guilty of “inciting religious hatred” or selling unlicensed medical products. Information minister Annas Al-Fiqi ominously described the moves as “corrective measures.”

A second government decree effectively restricted the ability of satellite news channels to do live broadcasts from the field.

Now there’s concern that the government will turn its attention to Facebook, the social networking platform that has become an effective tools for activists to connect, disseminate information and organise protests. Guests on a recent state television talk show railed against Facebook as a danger to domestic stability.

“We need to prevent problems, strikes and vandalism in the country by regulating it,” said one guest.

Commentor Ossama Diab, writing in the Guardian said, “The recent media crackdown — and the talk of ‘regulating’ Facebook in Egypt —  is an indicator that the regime does not have the slightest intention of playing the political game fairly and freely.”

Ironically, the current campaign takes place at the same time that Egypt is being credited with an overall improvement in press freedom. The organisation Reporters Without Borders released its annual press freedom index, last week, moving Egypt up 16 spots to 127.

Ashraf Khalil is a regional editor at Index on Censorship and a senior reporter for Al Masry Al Youm English Edition

The post Egypt tightens the screw appeared first on Index on Censorship.