• Founder of hotshop Elephant Cairo offers lessons: take digital seriously and treat audience with respect

   

  A year ago, Ali Ali was founding Egypt's creative boutique Elephant Cairo, a hotshop that has attracted Google and Coca-Cola and won awards at Cannes. Now, the Cairo native and Miami Ad School graduate's full-time job is toppling the Mubarak regime.

• To do so, Mr. Ali, 35, is brainstorming guerrilla-marketing tactics.

    

  Last week, he took a decades-old photograph of President Hosni Mubarak, added a Hitler-esque toothbrush moustache and floppy hair, and found an opposition-friendly printer willing to open his shop late at night and run off 100 copies of the silk-screened poster. Mr. Ali headed to Tahrir Square to hand the sheets out to protesters and his Mubarak image shot around the world in news photos and blogs.

• Before the protests started, Mr. Ali was busy running Elephant Cairo, which he refers to as a creative boutique rather than an agency because it employs only four people, including Mr. Ali. But beyond Google, Elephant has managed to snag clients that include Sprite and Coca-Cola, who Mr. Ali also worked with in his previous job as regional creative director of McCann Erickson's Middle East network Fortune Promoseven. His fledgling shop picked up a Silver Lion at the Cannes Lions Festival last year and swept Cannes' regional Middle East awards, the Dubai Lynx.

    

  "I think it'll take a couple months for brands to start advertising again [in Egypt]," he said. "[Advertisers will be] concerned that messages will be seen as insensitive, and not in touch with what's happening. This isn't the time to say 'We have better cheese' or 'Our phone calls are cheaper.' Hopefully Elephant will stay in business."

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• CAIRO - It was sparked on social-networking sites, and inspired by a revolution in Tunisia. In 18 days, it grew into something astounding - a leaderless people's movement that at every turn outsmarted a government with an almost unblemished 30-year record of suppressing dissent.
• In the end, images of riot police and pro-government thugs attacking and killing unarmed civilians are what broke Mubarak. Rather than force people off the streets through intimidation, the violence simply galvanized more to join the revolt.
• The government's efforts to control the message by cutting off the Internet and phones, and by arresting scores of journalists and activists, similarly backfired. Each day, ever greater numbers of Egyptians turned out to the square to see for themselves the movement reshaping their country.

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• Nearby, Marwan Saleh, 34, stood silent and absorbed every moment. By phone, he updated his Facebook status to tell people about the joy, the flags waving in the air and the songs being sung about the love of Egypt. For now the battle was over. The battle was won, he said.

• 'This is about social networks that are beyond the reach of Mubarak'

    

  Large parts of the Internet essentially went dark about midnight Egypt time after the government of President Hosni Mubarak, a longtime ally of Washington, ordered service providers and cell phone companies to shut down. 
• hile it looks like Egypt has been cut off — attempts to get to pretty much any Web site in Egypt are unsuccessful, and Twitter.com is unavailable inside the country — protesters and sympathizers have been able to get their message out through a variety of means because "what the government does is very effective for stopping the most basic users, meaning average users, the folks who probably aren't Twitter users," says Philip N. Howard, director of the Project on Information Technology and Political Islam at the University of Washington and author of "The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam." 
• Most of the folks who are tweeting are kind of the digital elite who can set up proxy servers and Twitter clients and get their message out," he says. "It only takes a few thousand of those folks to feed the rest of us news about what's going on."

• Why would the government "shut off" the Internet?

  It's clear that in today's digital media world, the best thing a dictator can do to manage a crisis is try to shut off digital networks. Mobile phone networks and digital networks are what savvy students and civil society leaders use to spread their message. 
  Sometimes that message is political; sometimes it's coordinating the logistics — say, "today's protests are at the corner of such and such." That's much easier now because of Facebook and Twitter.

•  For mobile phone networks, the thing to do is shut off cell phone towers. Authoritarian regimes are usually slower and more clumsy than cell phone[-using] activists. So when you shut off cell phone towers, this has the effect of pushing traffic to other cell phone towers. This is what happened in Iran in 2009.

  Cairo's a global city, so there's a lot of people with international mobile phones and Skype connections, so shutting down the cell phone towers doesn't always work well.
• The second way is to shut down Internet exchange points. There's going to be a couple of hotels that have good security and are air-conditioned [housing those exchanges], and the government would send in some folks to turn the power off. That doesn't always go well, because if one node goes out, there are other nodes. For example, people are uploading videos to Israel through Europe. It slows down the traffic, but it doesn't stop it.

• What factors does the government have to balance in deciding whether the tactical advantage of cutting off access is worth the public relations damage of being seen as interfering with the Internet?

  I don't think the regime is worried about whether the nation's computer users will be upset. I think they're mostly worried about the communications between families and friends among the citizens of Cairo. Digital networks are ultimately social networks. The 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 — there is no regime response for those images that go out over trusted networks. 
• It only takes a few thousand of those folks to feed the rest of us news about what's going on. Definitely around the American University of Cairo, theres a pretty savvy student population. Next to Iran, Egypt has the largest blogging community in the region. The regime doesn't seme to win the information war very well.
• In today's connected, mobilized world, you can't shut the Internet off for more than a few hours. Shutting the Internet off affects the security services and the economy, so it's sort of a scattershot approach — the state hurts itself, too.

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• An unlikely revolutionary sparks a monumental uprising with the click of a mouse.

   

  So much for brand loyalty. The defining act in the life of Wael Ghonim, a Google employee since 2008, was founding a group on Facebook.

    

  "We are all Khaled Said," declared his group's thousands of members, associating themselves with the young Alexandrian Internet activist beaten to death in Egyptian police custody in June 2010. That group grew rapidly from seed to sprout.
• Wael Ghonim
• Wael Ghonim

• After members helped organize the first Egyptian protests in January 2011, Hosni Mubarak's government decided to cut off the Internet to try to stop them from bringing more protesters to Tahrir Square.

    

  Absent from center stage in this drama was the social-media Trotsky himself. Ghonim was snatched up by Egyptian authorities on January 28, and interrogated in isolation for 12 straight days. In Ghonim's telling, his questioners were incredulous rather than violent -- shocked that all of this revolt could have erupted from the efforts of just a few "noisy kids on Facebook," while Egyptian state media were blaming meddling by foreign powers. The media were issuing countrywide alarms: look out for Israeli, Qatari, and Iranian spies. Then the police met their revolutionary, and he was an Egyptian.

• Of the Egyptian revolution's few unmistakable inflection points, Ghonim's post-prison interview with Dream TV was perhaps the most decisive. Ghonim, who had been unaware of the unfolding drama while he was in custody, spoke through tears about the revolution's dead. This emotional display was utterly alien to the Mubarak regime -- and proof to many wavering Egyptians that the revolutionaries were humans, and the government was a heartless bureaucracy easily capable of every brutality of which it had been accused. Popular fear dissolved, and Tahrir Square became a protest site for ordinary Egyptians, not just for Facebook friends and a crowd of tweeting revolutionaries.

    

  

• Held by authorities while Egypt's government teetered, Ghonim says his captors were shocked by the modest origins of the revolt.

    

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• If there was a face to the Egyptian protester at the start of last year's revolution, it belonged to Wael Ghonim.

   

  The administrator of the "We are all Khaled Saeed" Facebook page was one of the forces behind the online campaign that publicised and promoted the street protests and radical fervour that led to the toppling of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's former president. Khalid Saeed, in whose memory Ghonim's group was set up, had been beaten to death while in police custody.

• Ghonim, a Google marketing manager, disappeared in Cairo on January 28, 2011. His employer, family and friends mounted a desperate campaign to learn what had happened to him, and it was several days before it was revealed that he had been taken into custody.

   

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  Released after 11 days, the 30-year-old continued his activism and later wrote Revolution 2.0 - detailing the harrowing experience of being kept blindfolded for the duration of his detainment and the exhilaration of being part of his country's push for change after three decades of Mubarak rule.

   
• Wael Ghonim: Despite the fact that I voted "No" [in the March 19 constitutional referendum], hoping to see a constitution before the elections, the majority agreed on the roadmap we are going through now. Being concerned or not isn't what will make a difference now. Our job is to closely monitor the integrity of the process and ensure that we elect a president that represents the will of the people, and that a constitution is drafted that sets the values of equality, democracy and freedom that we've aspired for.
• nd of freedom of expression.
• DP: What is the role of activists - on-the-ground types, as well as those who operate via social media - in post-revolution, post-election Egypt?
  
  WG: Activists are evangelists. We have two main jobs - one is to put enough pressure on the government and parliament to ensure that we rebuild our nation's governing power on the basis of human rights, equality and social justice. The other job is to continue to communicate with as many Egyptians as we can, to ensure that their level of involvement is high enough to ensure that the government is listening to the voice of reason
• One of the most critical roles the newly elected leader will need to work on is that of uniting Egyptians. The nation won't move forward with different parties and political movements wasting their time and effort deepening the gaps among them. It will move forward if we truly believe that we've got real work to do, for Egyptians - who have been suffering for years.
  
  Having a bird’s-eye view on what is happening in the country, I'm very optimistic about our future. I'm a true believer that we are moving forward and making history, despite all the hurdles and challenges that we are facing. These challenges are expected, given that the country is recovering from over 30 years of dictatorship. I don't have a crystal ball to see the future, but I believe that Egypt is never going back to the pre-January 25th era.

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• After the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and his regime on February 11, 2011, political activists and the Egyptian public have not stopped protesting in downtown Cairo’s Tahrir Square. The main purpose of these ongoing protests is to pressure the caretaker government to put the main figures of the Mubarak regime on trial, including the former Ministers of Interior, Tourism, Information, Finance, Industry, Trade, and Housing. Protestors are calling for the trial not only of these people but also of former President Mubarak and his family.
• Under the pressure of these continuous demonstrations, the caretaker government arrested all the aforementioned ministers as well as other individuals loyal to the regime. The government is investigating whether these individuals are guilty of embezzlement of public funds, abuse of power, and illegal profiteering. This article discusses the charges of abuse of power and illegal profiteering against Mubarak, his wife, and two sons.

• Investigation

   

  The caretaker government adopted a number of legal measures to investigate the charges against Mubarak’s family. The General Prosecutor banned Mubarak and his family from traveling outside of Egypt. Further, he prohibited them from having access to their personal bank accounts in Egypt and abroad.[1]

   

  The government created a Judicial Commission to investigate the real property owned by Mubarak and his family in foreign countries. Officials from the Egyptian Ministry of Justice, judges, and law professors comprise this committee. According to news accounts, the General Prosecutor requested that the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs work through diplomatic means in conjunction with the Commission to inquire about the controversial wealth of Mubarak’s family and all family accounts in foreign banks. The Commission is also cooperating with the Ministries of Justice in European Union countries and the Department of Justice in the United States to track any money-laundering operations and hard currency smuggling outside Egypt.[2]
• The government also established a fact-finding mission to investigate who authorized police forces to use live ammunition against peaceful protestors. This mission consists of human rights activists and magistrate judges. As a result of these shootings, over 800 people were killed and thousands were wounded. The mission is investigating whether Mubarak, as the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, used his powers to order the killing of demonstrators. Mubarak denies that allegation, claiming that the former Minister of Interior made that decision without Mubarak’s authorization.[3]

• According to the current Egyptian Minister of Justice, Mubarak could face the death penalty if he is convicted under articles 40, 230, and 235 of the Criminal Code. He is charged with inciting the killing of the protestors by giving direct orders to the police forces to use live ammunition against them. Article 40 provides that any individual who incites a felony is considered a main culprit.[9] Under Article 230, any individual who murders someone deliberately is sentenced to death.[10] Article 235 also imposes upon any individuals who contribute to the crime the same sentence as the offender.[11] If Mubarak is found guilty of the deliberate assassination of anti-regime protesters, he may face the death penalty.

   

  With respect to Mubarak’s criminal charges, the Office of the General Prosecutor announced on May 25, 2011, that Mubarak had been referred to the Criminal Court of Cairo to begin the process of his trial. The General Prosecutor assigned the Ministry of Interior the task of transferring Mubarak from a hospital in Sharm-al-Sheik, East of Cairo, to the Tora Prison hospital to stand trial for the deliberate killing and attempted murder of protestors.[12]

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