Matthew Cox's List: Mubarak Overthrow 012713

• (CNN) -- Wael Ghonim, Google executive by day, secret Facebook activist by night, famously declared right after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down in February: "If you want to liberate a society just give them the Internet."

  Overthrowing a government is one thing. But building a sustainable democracy is turning out to be more difficult, and the Internet's role in that process is much less clear.
• In March, Egyptian activists stormed state security offices around the country. Some people found their own surveillance files, still intact, full of transcripts of their mobile phone text messages, e-mail exchanges and even Skype chats.

• One activist even found a contract sent from a Western company to the Egyptian state security bureau for the sale of surveillance technology. Activists in Egypt assume that the transitional government still has such technologies at its disposal.

  In Tunisia, censorship returned in May, not nearly as extensive as before, but still the transitional government decided that some Web pages could incite violence and therefore needed to be blocked.

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