Christopher Battle's List: How technology crippled Mubarak's regime of terror in Egypt.

• During a time of unrest that saw Mubarak's regime disconnect Egypt from the Internet for several days,
• "I certainly do not think he would have left office at this point if it wasn't for social networking tools," said Brad Shimmin, principal analyst with Current Analysis. "I think they wanted all eyes to be turned away from the uprising, but the crackdowns on Internet access failed.

• And many have used them to great impact, perhaps most famously the April 6 Youth Movement and Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who was one of the creators of the ‘We Are All Khaled Said’ Facebook group and accompanying YouTube campaign.
• What began as the blocking of Twitter and Facebook became the complete shutdown of both services.
• Thus, while services such as Facebook could be used in advocacy activities such as recruitment campaigns, they could not be trusted for sensitive organizing.
• Most senior organizers we spoke with still ran their core activities in a very analog, cell-based fashion
• Upon returning to their communities, these leaders would distribute handwritten organizing documents to collaborators. Using such tactics, one group was able to slowly but confidently disseminate a confidential organizing strategy to a network of 8,000 activists nationwide.

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• At once angered and animated, the Egyptian-­born Ghonim went online and created a Facebook page. “Today they killed Khaled,” he wrote. “If I don’t act for his sake, tomorrow they will kill me.” It took a few moments for Ghonim to settle on a name for the page, one that would fit the character of an increasingly personalized and politically galvanizing Internet. He finally decided on “Kullena Khaled Said” — “We Are All Khaled Said.”

• That said, the vast majority of Egyptians do want Mubarak out. His regime bans political parties, rigs elections, lies to the people, arrests thousands without cause, and cuts off the Internet. During my time in Egypt I witnessed three instances of abuse of power that made me want “Ramses the Twelfth,” as Egyptians call him, out too
• Most of my Egyptian friends decided not to vote; they saw no reason, no hope for change, and no chance that their vote would be counted.
• Mubarak also controls the flow of information. The most circulated newspaper, Al-Ahram, is government controlled and funded. In the aftermath of the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks at Sharm El-Sheik, Al-Ahram published a Photoshopped photo depicting Mubarak and Obama together, while the real photo had Mubarak behind the rest of the leaders. Other newspapers published the real picture, the un-Photoshopped version, but with 80 percent of Egyptians reading the government paper, false information was always the norm.

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