Kent Jarrell's List: Mubarak Egypt Digital Technology

• The Egyptian government’s decision to cut all communication systems, including the internet and mobile phones, on the night of 27 January was widely perceived to be a watershed moment in the overthrow of the Mubarak government. The decision was instantly condemned by human rights organizations across the world and many other governments. Egyptian protest sympathizers were unable to watch events on their computers and televisions and joined the demonstrators in Tahrir Square instead. The Mubarak government stepped down on 12 February and was replaced by a military council purporting to support democratic change

• There is considerable disagreement about the importance of digital technology in determining the outcomes of civil unrest in Arab countries at the start of 2011. Amnesty International acknowledges the importance of digital technology in the success of the civil uprising in Tunisia and Egypt (in its April 2011 report) but it also warns that the same technology can be used by threatened regimes to suppress civil unrest. Dissident groups can easily be infiltrated and the same technology has not been so successful in Yemen, Syria and Bahrain. Although President Saleh of the Yemen was eventually forced to leave the country after being injured by a rocket attack (4 June 2011), it appears that the most important factor in his overthrow was the turning against him of previously supportive powerful family groups. China has taken much firmer control of its internet as a result of events in Arab countries, fearing a contagion effect. After an internet call for popular revolt in February, over 100 activists are reported to have ‘disappeared’.

   

• While the Egyptian government attempted to use digital technologies as a way to repress the uprisings, networks of activists from around the world quickly mobilized in solidarity with the pro-democracy movement. Egypt’s decision to shut off Internet access in the country was unprecedented, and it was the first time in history that an entire country disconnected itself from the Inter

  net. Telecomix, a decentralized organization of Internet activists, quickly organized to provide free fax numbers and dial-up internet access to activists in Egypt so they could publicize the events and demonstrations occurring across the country. Telecomix also plays a key role in exposing the business ties between repressive regimes and Western technology companies, most recently in Syria.

    

• While uprisings and revolutions will always be about physical bodies in public spaces, technologies still remain an important tool in transmitting information and spreading news of repression. For example, in Syria, where attempts to organize protests on social networks were quickly hindered, information technologies have been important avenue for communicating with the outside world. The Tor Project, a free piece of software which allows users to anonymously connect to the internet and evade state surveillance, has been critically important in allowing activists to avoid identification and repression. The Tor Project, like Telecomix, is organized through the cooperation of programmers and activists from across the globe in hopes of assisting people’s movements. Having learned from earlier examples of surveillance and repression, Arab activists are using software like Tor with increasing frequency in order to hinder attempts to quell access to information and communication.

    

• Like all technologies that came before them, digital-information technologies both provide activists with opportunities to communicate and network while also enabling new modes of repression, censorship, and surveillance. Whether these tools help or hinder global social movements and uprisings will depend on the participants’ understanding of these assets, and their abilities to adapt to efforts of state policing and control.

    

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• Autocratic governments often limit phone and Internet access in tense times. But the Internet has never faced anything like what happened in Egypt on Friday, when the government of a country with 80 million people and a modernizing economy cut off nearly all access to the network and shut down cellphone service.
• The shutdown caused a 90 percent drop in data traffic to and from Egypt, crippling an important communications tool used by antigovernment protesters and their supporters to organize and to spread their message.

• The Mubarak regime’s desperation for total information control across Egypt is growing, and what started as censorship of certain social media websites and text messaging, and which eventually grew to banning news networks and downing the entire Internet is still growing tonight, with the government announcing that all cell phone networks across Egypt will now be shut down.