Valerie Auxila's List: Egyptian dictatorial government

• On Jan. 27, just before the Egyptian government turned off the Internet for all Egyptians, Facebook saw six times more traffic than Google inside the country.
• Two weeks later, and with relatively little bloodshed, the 30-year government of Hosni Mubarak ended.
• It's indisputable that the Internet and social media played a pivotal role. In fact, the revolution may not have happened without them
• when a Google employee named Wael Ghonim anonymously started a Facebook page to commemorate the death of Khaled Said, beaten to death by police for flaunting drug possession online.
• The wildfire flame of social networking burned quickly. In just a few weeks, Ghonim's page — We are all Khaled Said — had accumulated 130,000 fans, according to the New York Times. Ghonim this week said that the page has 375,000 followers. (The English-language site visible to U.S. Facebookers has just over 71,000 followers.) In a country with around 5 million Facebook users, that is a large percentile, and doesn't count Facebook users who may visit the page without "liking" it.
• n exiled video blogger was thanked for his role in sending a repressive dictator packing, while another blogger was named junior minister for communications in the interim government. The relatively poor country of 10 million had 4 million Internet users; restrictions were not enough to stop the social-media-fueled upheaval.
• Egyptian activists, perhaps prodded by the success of the Tunisian revolt, used Facebook to organize a demonstration that started on Jan. 25.
• he real threat to the regime is people will take pictures of the police beating their brothers and sisters, and the regime can't respond well to Facebook images of the police shooting rubber bullets into a crowd,"
• This made the Egyptian government nervous, to put it mildly. And they pulled the plug.
• "It's like the entire Internet forgot where Egypt was,"
• Egypt holds the dubious honor of being the first country to shut off its Internet, cutting off about 20 million people, a quarter of the nation's population.
• Egypt achieved the task by ordering the country's Internet service providers to, in effect, disconnect from the rest of the world.
• Cell phone and landline voice service continued, but SMS text messaging was also disabled.
• On Monday, Feb. 1, a service called SpeakToTweet, launched by Google and Twitter, brought voices of Net-deprived Egyptians to the global forum of Twitter by way of a phone number.
• Just like regular voicemail, people could call and leave a message.
• But it had problems. If you didn't speak Arabic, you probably couldn't understand a word of the messages, which came through to Twitter anonymous and almost completely unmarked.
• , Small World News, created a site called Alive In Egypt that posted the translations of the tweets, along with the original audio.
• "It just shows you that human networks are much older than computer networks, and are much more resilient," Renesys' Cowie told me. "People will find a way around everything."
• "This cost Egypt tens of millions of dollars per day for lost e-business," Cowie said.
• on Feb. 2, Egypt's Internet connections sprang back to life,
• The images and videos that escaped during the outage were rendered more uplifting and powerful by their illicit nature. "How do you make everybody care?" asks Cowie. "Turn off the Internet."

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• "This is the holiest place on the planet," said Hassan Abu Baqr. The university professor
• "Where else on the planet do you have a people that overthrow their dictator completely peacefully," he said.

• February 11,   2011 after an 18-day popular revolt
• Mubarak rose to power unexpectedly, when then President Anwar Sadat, who made   history by signing a peace deal with Israel, was gunned down by Islamist   militants on October 6, 1981 at a military parade in Cairo.
• Mubarak took office a week later and ruled without interruption until last   year.

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• Hosni Mubarak ruled Egypt for over twenty-nine years.
• Though he ran for
  presidential reelection several times, elections were marked by widespread
  fraud, and opposing politicians were legally prohibited from running against
  Mubarak until 2005.