Reuben Leonard's List: How technology crumbles Mubarak government

• But that doesn’t mean social media didn’t play a role. It did. Given the magnitude of grievances in each country, revolt would almost certainly have come eventually. But social media simply made it come faster. It did so by playing a role in three main dynamics:
• Organizing protests
• Shaping the narrative
• Putting pressure on Washington
• Did social media make all this happen? No, of course not. Did it bring everything to a head much sooner than it would have, had Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube not existed? Absolutely.

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• The new service, which has been created by co-ordination between the two internet companies, uses Google's speech-to-text recognition service to automatically translate provides an online voicemail service and tweets a link to each message, which is sent out on Twitter with the "#egypt" hashtag.

• All have argued one way or another that since there were revolutions before social media, and it is people who make revolutions, how could it be important?
• Except social media has played a role. For those of us who have covered these events, it has been unavoidable.
• Instead, the importance and impact of social media on each of the rebellions we have seen this year has been defined by specific local factors (not least how people live their lives online in individual countries and what state limits were in place). Its role has been shaped too by how well organised the groups using social media have been.
• Tunisia not only exercised a tight monopoly on internet provision but blocked access to most social networking sites – except Facebook.
• "They wanted to close Facebook down in the first quarter of 2009," says Khaled Koubaa, president of the Internet Society in Tunisia, "but it was very difficult. So many people were using it that it appears that the regime backed off because they thought banning it might actually cause more problems [than leaving it]."

• Indeed, when the Tunisian government did shut it down briefly, for 16 days in August 2008, it was confronted with a threat by cyber activists to close their internet accounts. The regime was forced to back down.

  Instead, says Koubaa, the Tunisian authorities attempted to harass those posting on Facebook. "If they became aware of you on Facebook they would try to divert your account to a fake login page to steal your password."
• All of which left a peculiar loophole that persisted until December, when the regime finally launched a full-scale attack against Facebook.
• "Social media was absolutely crucial," says Koubaa.
• What made a difference this time is that the images of Bouazizi were put on Facebook and everybody saw it."

• If Twitter had negligible influence on events in Tunisia, the same could not be said for Egypt. A far more mature and extensive social media environment played a crucial role in organising the uprising against Mubarak, whose government responded by ordering mobile service providers to send text messages rallying his supporters – a trick that has been replicated in the past week by Muammar Gaddafi.
• In Egypt, details of demonstrations were circulated by both Facebook and Twitter and the activists' 12-page guide to confronting the regime was distributed by email. Then, the Mubarak regime – like Ben Ali's before it – pulled the plug on the country's internet services and 3G network. What social media was replaced by then – oddly enough – was the analogue equivalent of Twitter: handheld signs held aloft at demonstrations saying where and when people should gather the next day.
• "Social media has certainly played a part in the Arab Spring Revolutions but its impact is often exaggerated on the inside. Egypt was disconnected from the outside world for days and yet the movement never stopped. I have missed work, I have missed sleep, I have forgotten to eat, I have strained my eyes, fingers and hands, I am not Tunisian, Egyptian or Libyan, but it's all been worth it.
• "Today Libya is facing an even more severe internet disruption, yet we continue to see the movement picking up pace. Where social media had a major impact was conveying the news to the outside world, bloggers and Twitter users were able to transmit news bites that would otherwise never make it to mainstream news media.
• Social networking sites have supplied the most graphic images of the crackdowns on protesters, but also broadcast messages from hospitals looking for blood, rallied demonstrators and provided international dial-up numbers for those whose internet has been blocked. Libyan activists also asked Egyptians to send their sim cards across the border so they could communicate without being bugged.
• "It was through Facebook that the first support groups following what happened in Sidi Bouzid were set up and the first demonstrations organised," she says. "Social media was critical at a time when everything else was censored."
• One of these narratives – created right at the beginning – was the story of Bouazizi himself. The story of a university graduate forced to sell fruit who killed himself when he could not even do that proved to be incendiary. Except one of the key facts wasn't true. Bouazizi not only hadn't been to university, he had not even completed his school baccalaureate.

• But there has been another critical factor at work that has ensured that social media has maintained a high profile in these revolutions. That is the strong reliance that mainstream media such as the Doha-based television network Al Jazeera has had to place on material smuggled out via Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. This arrangement means that videos have often been broadcast back in to the country of origin – when Al Jazeera has managed to avoid having its signal blocked.

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• The real trigger for the uprisings, they argue, is simply the frustration of the oppressed Egyptian people — which is undoubtedly true. But it also seems clear that social media has played a key role in getting the word out, and in helping organizers plan their protests. In the end, it’s not about Twitter or Facebook: it’s about the power of real-time networked communication.
• Foreign Policy magazine columnist Evgeny Morozov has argued that Twitter and Facebook should not be credited with playing any kind of critical role in Tunisia, and suggested that doing so is a sign of the “cyber-utopianism” that many social-media advocates suffer from: that is, the belief that the Internet is unambiguously good, or that the use of Twitter or Facebook can somehow magically free a repressed society from its shackles. Morozov, who has written an entire book about this idea called Net Delusion, made the point in his blog post after the Tunisian uprising that while social media might have been used in some way during the events, tools like Twitter and Facebook did not play a crucial role — that is, the revolution would have happened with or without them.
• Zeynep Tufekci, a professor of sociology who has also looked at this issue, described in a post following the revolution in Tunisia how professional observers distinguish between what she called “material,” “efficient” and “final” causes — in other words, things that are required in order to produce a certain outcome, and things that are nice to have but are not a requirement.
• Ethan Zuckerman, one of the founders of Global Voices Online, has also written about how the uprisings in both Tunisia and in Egypt have more to do with decades of poverty and repressive dictatorships than they do with social media.
• The argument I have tried to make is simply that they and other social media tools can be incredibly powerful, both for spreading the word — which can give moral or emotional support to others in a country, as well as generating external support — as well as for organizational purposes, thanks to the power of the network. As Jared Cohen of Google Ideas put it, social media may not be a cause, but it can be a powerful “accelerant.”
• But open-network advocate Dave Winer made the key point: it’s the Internet that is the really powerful tool here, not any of the specific services such as Twitter and Facebook that run on top of it, which Winer compares to brands like NBC.

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• "The link between citizen journalism and mainstream media is crucial,"
• One strategy for the change is to make wrongdoings in society visible, and "crowdpower" is a way to make this happen; there is a TortureMap for crowdmapping torture and another one for corruption.
• "Transparency is a weapon against corruption. The more information there is about the span of the problem, the bigger possibility there is for a change. And when people know which police stations are corrupted, they can be prepared for that and, for example, hide video cameras and shoot incidents at the station," said Kamal Sedra, a digital activist.
• Crowdfunding initiatives in Egypt also have been organized through social media. In an online event called Tweetback, Egyptians gathered funds for humanitarian projects. Companies, non-profits and individuals were invited to donate.

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• Mr. Said, a 28-year-old Egyptian businessman, was pulled from an Internet cafe in Alexandria last June by two plainclothes police officers, who witnesses say then beat him to death in the lobby of a residential building. Human rights advocates said he was killed because he had evidence of police corruption.
• “There were many catalysts of the uprising,”
• “The first was the brutal murder of Khalid Said.”
• The Tunisian rebellion was set off after a fruit vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, burned himself to death after being humiliated by the police.
• But Mr. Said’s death may be the starkest example yet of the special power of social networking tools like Facebook even — or especially — in a police state.
• “Prior to the murder of Khaled Said, there were blogs and YouTube videos that existed about police torture, but there wasn’t a strong community around them,”
• “This case changed that.”
• While it is almost impossible to isolate the impact of social media tools from the general swirl of events that set off the popular uprisings across the Middle East, there is little doubt that they provided a new means for ordinary people to connect with human rights advocates trying to amass support against police abuse, torture and the Mubarak government’s permanent emergency laws allowing people to be jailed without charges.
• Facebook and YouTube also offered a way for the discontented to organize and mobilize — and allowed secular-minded young people to seize the momentum from Egypt’s relatively neutered, organized opposition.
• Far more decentralized than political parties, the strength and agility of the networks clearly caught Egyptian authorities — and American intelligence analysts — by surprise, even as the Egyptian government quickly attempted to shut them down.
• “What made this case different is that Khaled Said was just an ordinary person,” said Gamal Eid, 47, a lawyer and executive director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information in Cairo. “He was just a guy who found evidence of corruption and he published it. Then when people learned what happened to him, when people saw pictures of his face, people got very angry.”
• “He is a big part of our revolution,” said Hudaifa Nabawi, a 20-year-old student in Tahrir Square on Saturday. “Khalid Said was a special case. He didn’t belong to any faction, and he didn’t do anything wrong. He became the way to focus our perceptions around the oppression that all the youth all face. You can consider him a symbol.”

• Signaling the Mubarak government’s growing awareness about the powerful role that social media are playing in Egypt, pro-Mubarak supporters began jumping into the Khaled Said Facebook page’s conversation soon after access to the Internet was restored last week.

   There are now wall posts and comments on the page, blasting antigovernment supporters, demanding that Mr. Mubarak be given a chance and spreading disinformation, including that the “day of departure” protest on Friday was canceled.

   But that did little to deter the protesters. “If you think you can go on Facebook and tell the people to go home, it’s too late for that,” said Omar Ghoneim, 32, who walked to Friday’s protest, wearing two bandages on his right hand from, he said, throwing tear gas canisters back at the police.

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• Early last year, however, as the Arab Spring swept through the region, something odd happened: the social media sites that were pivotal to uprisings in other Arab nations were suddenly switched back on.
• Now we know why: It's easier to track people –and find out who is against you – if you can monitor computer traffic to such sites, or trick visitors into clicking on tainted links that download spyware onto their computers, rights activists and cyber experts say.
• As bombs fall and bullets fly, dissidents and opposition figures have had their favorite social media tools turned against them, and their cloak of anonymity pierced by veiled online hackers loyal to Syria's government.
• Last fall, the government bought centralized Internet eavesdropping equipment. But dropping spyware directly onto activists' computers is Syria's newest cyber war trend.
• Luring opposition sympathizers with tainted video links in e-mail, fake Skype encryption tools, tainted online documents, hackers believed allied to Syria's government have in recent months deployed an array of powerful spyware with names like DarkComet, backdoor.bruet, and Blackshades. Available on the Internet, these malware are used to infiltrate the personal computers of opposition figures, rights activists and send back information on their friends and contacts as well as passwords, cyber security experts say. Impact of this spying is hard to gauge. But even as the physical battle intensifies in around Damascas, Syria cyber watchers are worried.
• "Blocking, however, prevented the tracking down of activists, so the regime ultimately responded by unblocking sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter," he writes in a recent analysis posted on the group's website. "This move enabled the regime's security apparatus to conduct its internal cyber war against its own people and aided in tracking down the identities of activists."
• • Amazing the length that the government would go through,to track and attack its citizens.
• "It's clear that the Assad regime has learned lessons from Libya, Tunisia and Egypt and that's why they are pursuing this tactic," she says. "Using malware to infiltrate individuals' computers is a characteristic of the Syrian conflict that's not been widely seen in other Arab-spring uprisings."
• To watch dissidents' activities online, the Assad government has deployed Branch 225, the secret Syrian communications security department in charge of Internet monitoring, according to both Mr. Baiazy's study and Mr. Zaluski. As part of that effort, Syria last year purchased millions of dollars of Internet filtering equipment – much of it made in the US and Europe – to track communications to Facebook and other sites.
• As a result, Syria's government is resorting to state-supported actors who are launching attacks that take over online accounts without the user knowing it. In other cases it's meant forging fake Facebook pages to steal activists' passwords. Security forces have also used torture against captured opponents to obtain the passwords to their Facebook and email accounts, Mr. Baiazy reports.
• Amid this turmoil, the Syrian Electronic Army, a hacker militia loyal to the Assad regime, has come to the fore. It is this later group that infiltrates opposition computers directly that's apparently moving hard after activists' identities by taking spyware available on the Internet –and customizing it to be invisible to anti-virus security.
• "What we've seen in Syria is a campaign targeting activists with surveillance malware," says Morgan Marquis-Boire, a cyber-security researcher with Citizen Lab, a Toronto-based computer security think tank.
• His research, which has involved analyzing malware captured on the hard drives of Syrian activists, has identified 16 separate types of malicious software. All of those have at their core the purpose of delivering into the computer another nasty piece of malware called a "remote access trojan" or RAT. Once activated, the RAT sends information to computers located within Syria's telecom service.
• Several RATs are being used. One in particular, called DarkComet, is frequently delivered by a compromised Skype account belonging to a trusted friend, Mr. Marquis-Boire says. In that way many are infected.
• Once established, DarkComet gives control of the machine to the hacker who can then order the computer to record keystrokes, capture passwords, or activate the machine's webcam or microphone. Or it can send personal information and e-mail address books back to Syrian authorities.
• "We have found that Facebook and other forums that carry the comments of pro-Syria liberation groups frequently are seeded with videos of atrocities in Holms that also include malware," Mr. Marquis-Boire says. "It's dangerous to trust too much what you find online."

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• For the first time he's facing a new threat as well: crowdsourcing, a kind of collective leadership, elusive and resilient, the likes of which Egypt has never experienced. Its manifestoes--even the chants shouted in the faces of the cops--have been polished by dozens of anonymous editors on a Google document. "We are Egypt's youth on the Internet," they proclaimed on the eve of last Friday's protests. Mubarak cannot keep Egypt unplugged forever, and they know it.

• Middle Eastern Youthquake

   

  Over the past two decades, a demographic change has swept across the Arab world. Roughly a third of the population in the region is now under 30. Frustrated by a lack of political freedom and economic opportunity, the young are demanding change.

• Tunisia	0.29
  Morocco	0.29
  Algeria	0.31
  Libya	0.28
  West Bank and Gaza	0.27
  Israel	0.23
  Egypt	0.29
  Lebanon	0.27
  Kuwait	0.25
  Bahrain	0.28
  Syria	0.31
  Iraq	0.28
  Iran	0.34
  Jordan	0.3
  Saudi Arabia	0.28
  Qatar	0.34
  Oman	0.31
  Yemen	0.3
  United Arab Emirates	0.27

    
• SOURCES: UNITED NATIONS DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIAL AFFAIRS; BROOKINGS INSTITUTION.
• MAP: Middle Eastern Youthquake

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