Clayton Haliburton's List: Egyptian Revolution

• Technological tools are indeed being used by those pursuing more participatory governance in Egypt. 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.
• Both have been much touted in Western media for galvanizing and connecting a new generation of Egyptian activists.
• Indeed, many Facebook users see the site as more of a publishing platform than a space for online socializing.
• These groups are using Facebook to create fully formed publishing cycles and advocacy campaigns, with limited to no use of external websites. This is an interesting example where efficiency over complexity is leading users to leapfrog the traditional technology adoption cycle.
• Perhaps the most interesting application of new media we encountered was this use of Facebook as an advocacy and press management tool by certain opposition groups.
• One leading organizer with the Democratic Front Party described how they turned to Facebook as a spin machine whenever the government provided an opportunity:
• “When the security forces broke in our front door on January 26, we immediately put up a Facebook group to collect popular anger and let the media know.”
• This strategy is effective because traditional media such as newspapers and broadcast news shows often report on the size and vociferousness of these groups as a proxy for expressing their own political views.
• At a basic level, text messages and voice calls enabled the Egyptian people to coordinate, to stay informed, and to communicate amongst themselves and to the outside world. That is, until the government began interfering with internet and mobile networks beginning on January 25. What began as the blocking of Twitter and Facebook became the complete shutdown of both services. Fully functional mobile services were not restored until February 3.
• But beyond immediate communications, the near-ubiquitous mobile phone also provided protesters the opportunity to document the events that were unfolding. As tools for crafting the revolution’s narrative, mobile phones gave protesters a sense of ownership over the events.
• Their videos and photos will also be used to shape the story that will live on. From our conversations, this increased the perceived value of participating.
• “It was our revolution because we made it happen. And it will stay our revolution because we will be the ones writing its history.”
• Projects such as #18DaysInEgypt, a documentary in development, illustrates this philosophy. This film about the Egyptian revolution will be “shot entirely by those who experienced the events [on-the-ground]”, done by crowdsourcing media content from tech-enabled protesters.
• Tech-related access barriers aside, as of March 17, roughly three weeks after the project site launched, only its About section was available in Arabic.
• The other two key sections — news updates and team bios — were English-only, revealing the project’s biases and intended audiences.
• This strategy has met with the desired success, as it’s been covered by the regular parade of international media outlets.
• Since that first message, the military leadership has been sending mass SMS to its citizens every two to five days to update them on its view of events. As of publication, the last SMS sent by the military was on March 7, and was directed at those who had raided State Security buildings days earlier and removed sensitive materials.
• “To all the responsible people, please hand in any National Security papers you may have to ensure we can take appropriate action on the information.”
• Thus, while services such as Facebook could be used in advocacy activities such as recruitment campaigns, they could not be trusted for sensitive organizing.
• Top strategies were set by leadership committees that gathered regularly in hubs like Cairo. 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.
• But trying to distinguish these tools from offline connections in Egyptian society is impossible. An incredibly social people, the amount of knowledge transfer that occurs in cafes, on street corners, and from roadside newspaper vendors is immense. It is this primary layer of offline interaction that provides much of the fodder for connections happening online.
• technology will continue to impact them only a proximate manner and through exposure to other, technologically enabled parties.
• While Egypt’s new Interior Minister Mansour el-Essawy has promised an end to online surveillance, the ubiquity of the practice, even in Western countries, gives little hope that his pledge will be honoured.
• Technology played a defined and concrete role in the revolution, but its contributions were complementary rather than core. Technology facilitated and encouraged connections and organizing that would have happened anyway.
• What is likely, and many observers will probably argue, is that access to technology did speed the pace with which reform was possible by lowering the costs of recruitment and organizing.

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• Micah Sifry says the internet alone didn't end Mubarak's regime
• He says tools such as Facebook and Twitter were key for the organizers of protests
• Combination of social media and repressive conditions puts harsh regimes at risk, he says
• A nucleus of human rights activists, lawyers, bloggers and labor organizers have been hard at work for several years in Egypt, risking prison, holding small rallies and vigils, raising consciousness online by distributing pictures and video of torture victims, writing protest manuals, mobilizing lawyers to petition arrested comrades out of prison and studying the lessons of other failed uprisings -- like the protests after Iran's 2009 election -- in order to develop more nimble and less controllable strategies to build their movement.
• Along the way, they devised some ingenious hacks around the police state, like using mobile phones and Twitter to share information about imprisoned activists and using international phone lines for sending text messages.
• They learned how to make more effective online videos with the help of Peter Gabriel's human rights group Witness, and how to use open source mapping tools with the help of the Kenyan nongovernmental group Ushahidi.

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• Mubarak thought he was God," Ali Asam, 50, said as he stood just outside Tahrir Square, named after the Arabic word for liberation. "He killed the people, he beat the people, and we won."
• 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.
• But she watched the security forces detain hundreds of people and kill hundreds more.
• In the first days of the protests, they were attacked with high-pressure water hoses, tear gas, birdshot, rubber bullets and live ammunition. Protesters responded with rocks, but also with pamphlets instructing demonstrators to appeal to the police as fellow Egyptians.

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• "Hold your head up high. You are Egyptian," protesters chanted after the announcement that Mubarak would step down.

• Much of the 50-minute town hall, however, focused on the role of Twitter and Facebook in organizing protests in Egypt.
• Critics of social media’s influence in activism are quick to point out that people organized and revolutions occurred long before the Internet existed. Indeed, the role of real people, bravery and sacrifice leading to President Hosni Mubarak's resignation is more important than Facebook or Twitter. While protests continued even after the Egyptian government shut off access to the Internet, the impact of social media can no longer be dismissed — especially when it’s acknowledged by the U.N.

• One of those tools is a set of Android-based apps which allow for encrypted communications.
• RedPhone, an encrypted voice-over-Internet calling app, and TextSecure, an app which encrypts text messages.
• Those applications are free and allow users to easily initiate secure conversations — be they over VoIP or through SMS — without the worry that someone might be able to trace or tap them.

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• group phone texting program providing news updates.
• Penner, the founder of GroupFlier, a group-texting program, created a free program to send text news alerts about Egypt to anyone who wanted them from various reporters as well as straight from Google exec Wael Ghonim, who became a lightning rod for the revolution with his recent imprisonment, then release by Egyptian police.
• "Egypt4Peace" group, which can be joined here or by texting "Egypt4Peace" to (617) 394-1386.
• "New tools are going to enable people to amplify the power of human behavior, although no one knows exactly how much or in exactly what way."

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