Morgan Robinson's List: Digital Citizenship in the Egyptian Revolution

• The first use is as a tool for mobilising citizens by producing material designed to inspire them into action, and to organise their action once recruited. The second is to use online platforms as a medium for citizen journalism to report on the situation.
• growth of a new kind of political movement that reflects the plural nature of social media.
• This has enabled a flat leadership model that is difficult for autocratic regimes to combat: such movements are strong in the face of government interference as they are not dependent on a strong hierarchical structure
• n the advocacy of street protest, over 400,000 people were signed up on Facebook. Moreover, throughout the protests Egyptian Facebook users believed that 85 percent of Facebook usage was to organize activism, raise awareness and spread information about event

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• That was the day Wael Ghonim, a 29-year-old Google marketing executive, was browsing Facebook in his home in Dubai and found a startling image: a photo­graph of a bloodied and disfigured face, its jaw broken, a young life taken away. That life, he soon learned, had belonged to Khaled Mohamed Said, a 28-year-old from Alexandria who had been beaten to death by the Egyptian police.
• “Today they killed Khaled,” he wrote. “If I don’t act for his sake, tomorrow they will kill me.”
• “Kullena Khaled Said” — “We Are All Khaled Said.”
• Wael Ghonim.
• . Two minutes after he started his Facebook page, 300 people had joined it. Three months later, that number had grown to more than 250,000
• What bubbled up online inevitably spilled onto the streets, starting with a series of “Silent Stands” that culminated in a massive and historic rally at Tahrir Square in downtown Cairo. “We Are All Khaled Said” helped ignite an uprising that led to the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak and the dissolution of the ruling National Democratic Party. In turn, Ghonim — who was arrested during the height of the protests — reluctantly became one of the leading voices of the Arab Spring.
• he Middle East is home to roughly 100 million people ages 15 to 29. Many are educated but unemployed. Though only a fraction of Egyptians have Internet access, Ghonim writes, the number of Web users in the country increased to 13.6 million in 2008 from 1.5 million in 2004.
• In Egypt’s case, it was simply a place for venting the outrage resulting from years of repression, economic instability and individual frustration
• He polled the page’s users and sought ideas from others, like how best to publicize a rally — through printed fliers and mass text messaging, it turned out. (“Reaching working-class Egyptians was not going to happen through the Internet and Facebook,” he notes.)
• As the youth-led Tunisian upheaval further inspired young activists in Egypt, Ghonim was arrested by the secret police. For nearly two weeks, he was held blindfolded and handcuffed, deprived of sleep and subjected to repeated interrogations, as his friends, family and colleagues at Google tried to discover his whereabouts. That he was released as quickly as he was demonstrated the power of Revolution 2.0.

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• or 30 years, Egyptians who protested their government or organized a political party did so knowing they could be arrested under an emergency law that gives the government broad powers to act against perceived threats to the country's stability.
• The Egyptian reply was the same as it has been since 1981: Not yet.
• There has been a litany of such excuses over the years - trouble with Islamist militants in the early 1990s; popular anger over the Iraq war or the Israeli-Palestinian dispute; the need to combat terrorism and drug trafficking.
• Under the emergency rules, political gatherings of more than a handful of people can be held only with the state's permission, and the government has allowed few new parties to organize or opposition groups to gather.
• The culture that has emerged as a result of this law over three decades is one in which the security forces have a widespread and deeply held conviction that they are above the law and that the constitution is irrelevant," said Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. "Because there is a state of emergency, they can get away with murder.
• The current state of emergency was imposed after the October 1981 assassination of Mubarak's predecessor, Anwar Sadat, who was killed by Islamic extremists.
• The law authorizing the president to declare a state of emergency has been on the books since 1967. Egyptian leaders have activated it almost uninterruptedly since then.
• When activated, the law allows security forces to detain people without warrants, circumvents traditional criminal courts to keep suspects detained for years, permits interceptions of communication and restricts gatherings such as protests.

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• It became and remains the biggest dissident Facebook page in Egypt, even as protests continue to sweep the country, with more than
• 473,000 users, and it has helped spread the word about the demonstrations in Egypt
• The Tunisian rebellion was set off after a fruit vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, burned himself to death after being humiliated by the police. His desperate act led to protests, which were recorded on mobile phones, posted on the Internet, shared on Facebook and eventually broadcast by Al Jazeera.
• 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.
• he was killed because the local police believed he had shot a video showing officers with illegal drugs.
• Facebook has been the social networking tool of choice for human rights activists in Egypt. There are five million Facebook users in Egypt, the highest number in any Middle Eastern or North African country.

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• 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.

• “In the same way that pamphlets didn’t cause the American Revolution, social media didn’t cause the Egyptian revolution,” said Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative. “Social media have become the pamphlets of the 21st century, a way that people who are frustrated with the status quo can organize themselves and coordinate protest, and in the case of Egypt, revolution.”
• successful revolutions are born in the streets
• Rafat Ali, a social media expert and founder of PaidContent, said Facebook and Twitter played different roles in the uprising. Facebook helped to organize the activists inside the country, he said, while Twitter functioned to help get the message out to the broader world.
• “It acts like an accelerant to conditions which already exist in the country. Twitter and YouTube serve as amplification for what’s happening on the ground. And they directly affect Western media coverage
• These despots are five generations older than the youth,” Ali said. “None of these people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s have ever used Facebook or Twitter.”
• Wael Ghonim, the young Google executive who has became a symbol of Egypt’s pro-democracy uprising after he launched the original Facebook page credited with sparking the initial protest, called the Egyptian upheaval, “Revolution 2.0.”
• “If you want to liberate a country, give them the internet,” Ghonim said.

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• Reuters confirms "major network disruptions" for Egypt Internet users at this time, with reports in Cairo that there is no Internet altogether. A top state official declined to comment.
• UPDATE: (7:30 p.m. ET) The Associated Press also confirms widespread Internet outages in Egypt. Italy-based Seabone, a major Internet service provider for Egypt, reported early Friday there was no Internet traffic going into or out of the country after 12:30 a.m. local time.

• UPDATE: (7:35 p.m. ET) AFP reports that cell phone text messaging also appears to be down in Egypt.

    

  UPDATE: (7:45 p.m. ET) Independent citizen media organization Global Voices just posted a report on Egypt's "Internet black hole" and notes it will attempt to file future reports from Egypt via phone calls and other communication methods.

    

  UPDATE: (9:45 p.m. ET) Internet intelligence authority Renesys has just weighed in with a blog post on recent developments:
• UPDATE: (2:10 a.m. ET) HuffPost reader Thomas Jaworowski, a tech enthusiast, emails in that he "decided to try a few tricks" to see if Egypt's Internet really was down or it was just server overload causing the problems. He traced IP addresses, particularly for the U.S. Embassy in Cairo which is hosted in Egypt, and found that the Web traffic is indeed being blocked at the country level, not just a simple censoring.

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• Despite the Hosni Mubarak regime’s attempts at muzzling communication and dissent, and the reportedly government-sanctioned shutdown of Egypt’s last standing Internet service provider to individual users Monday, Egyptians are still managing to get their voices heard and mobilize – both through advanced technical workarounds and older, traditional technologies.
• “We’re seeing that this is a country, a regime, which is hell-bent on trying to silence the people and not let the word get out,” Middle East and North Africa regional editor of Global Voices Amira al Hussaini told IPS in a telephone interview from Bahrain.

• On the more technical end, Anonymous, a decentralized community of cyber activists, over the weekend released a crowd-sourced document outlining twenty methods of circumventing the Internet outage. On the list were workarounds to accessing social networks, loopholes to connect to Web portals set up abroad and even ways to get online via ham radio.

   
• Meanwhile, for the majority of citizens without Internet access, sympathizers from large corporations to concerned individuals across the globe volunteered to disseminate bulletins from inside Egypt – no matter how they were received.

• In addition to deploying its army into the streets, declaring a 3pm curfew and effectively shutting off the web in Egypt, the regime in Cairo has also halted train service in an attempt to prevent protestors from gathering in Tahrir Square from other parts of the country for Tuesday’s march.

   

  Given the enormous turnout – the square is filled with more than a million people at press time, sources report – Mubarak’s efforts didn’t work. People already knew about the demonstrations, sources say, and the lack of transportation just prompted them to march in the large cities closest to where they live, such as Alexandria or Suez, in addition to Cairo.
• “We need to debunk the myth that all this was caused by new media,” Hussaini told IPS. “It’s not easy to change your mentality and all of a sudden say, ‘I’m going to a protest.’ A protest is something banned; it’s not allowed. New technologies did not change the whole mindset of a whole country. [Egyptians] have serious economic and political issues that need to be addressed.”
• Although social media networks like Facebook and Twitter helped organize the 25 January demonstrations – the first of these major, widespread protests in Egypt – the Internet blackout hasn’t prevented people from mobilizing the good, old-fashioned way: “We organize by word-of-mouth, plus phones,” Shereef Abbaf, a Cairo resident, told IPS in a telephone interview.

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• and as droves of Egyptian and foreign journalists were brutalized by thugs, plainclothes police, and uniformed authorities,
• olice dragged 26 Egyptian journalists from the steps of the building housing the journalists' syndicate.
• On the same day the 26 journalists were forcibly removed from the syndicate, Ahmad brazenly went on multiple television broadcasts, intimating that he had expanded personal capital with the now-deposed interior minister to free his constituency.
• They've driven their long-resented chief out of the syndicate, and posted it on YouTube, lest there be any doubt about their resolve.
• More than 500 media professionals have now condemned the crudely propagandist coverage of the uprising in state-controlled media.

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• . "Despite the tear gas and the beatings, we just kept coming, wave after wave of us," one protester said. "When some of us would tire, others would head in. We gave each other courage." After several hours, the police were forced into a full retreat. Then, as the army was sent in, they disappeared.
• A 4pm curfew set for today was casually ignored with people convinced the army would not harm them. The police were a different story. Their brutality the past few days—decades in fact—has been well documented.
• Saturday, some of the police forces were holed up inside their headquarters in the Interior Ministry building near the end of a street connected to Tahrir Square. When protesters neared the building, the police began firing live ammunition at the crowd, forcing them to flee back to the square. Three bloodied people were carried out. "The police are killing us," one man yelled desperately while on the phone with al Jazeera from outside the building. When the firing stopped, defiant protesters began approaching the building again. In the background, the smoking, blackened shell of Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party headquarters served as an ominous reminder of their intentions.
• There is a great sense of pride that this is a leaderless movement organized by the people. A genuine popular revolt.

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• l Jazeera's use of Twitter as a platform for self-promotion and up-to-date news dissemination helps to explain this Qatar-based organization's sudden explosion in popularity.
• The surprising circumstance of how Al Jazeera English has been able to leap into the limelight even in the US, sharing the stage with the likes of CNN and ABC seems inexplicable at first. It certainly hasn't been from far-reaching TV coverage - "the Egyptian authorities are revoking the Al Jazeera Network's license to broadcast from the country, and will be shutting down its bureau office in Cairo," according to an Al Jazeera article, and to reiterate a fact previously mentioned, the TV channel is only accessible in three U.S. cities (Washington D.C., Burlington, Vt., and Toledo, Ohio).
• l Jazeera has made tactical use of "Promoted Tweets", which are highlighted Tweets at the top of Twitter.com search results pages, paid for by advertisers. Essentially, Al Jazeera's Promoted Tweets have enabled the organisation to bypass the government-imposed censorship of its TV channel by directing the massive Twitter audience to its live, around-the-clock video stream on their website.

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• Al Jazeera has created a Twitter Dashboard to illustrate what is being tweeted about in the Middle East, and about where. The Qatar-based news organisation has attracted international attention for its coverage of the Middle East protests and revolutions, during which it had the advantage of being already well-installed in the region.

• Al Jazeera has more journalists on the ground, in-country, than any American news organization.

   
• “Al Jazeera Arabic and English have seven teams in Cairo plus multiple reporters in Alexandria, Suez and Ismailia,” a company spokesperson said.
• The revolution is not being televised, it’s being streamed,” the rep added.
• In order to make the news available worldwide, Al Jazeera has decided to make its content available for “other news sources to use through their Creative Commons website,” the company said. That means news outlets are free to use the organization’s reports and live footage, without getting permission, so long as the borrowers give credit.
• Al Jazeera’s website saw a 2500% increase in traffic Friday, with over 50% of that spike coming from the US alone, a company spokesperson said. The company’s servers crashed earlier today, but it has taken steps to beef them u

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• “It’s a law that symbolized the extraordinary powers given to the police, which created an environment in which forced disappearances and torture happened regularly,” said Heba Morayef, a Cairo-based researcher for Human Rights Watch.

• Alaa Abd El Fattah, a 29-year-old who has been at the forefront of anti-regime struggles for a decade and was a political prisoner during the Mubarak era,
• He refused to recognise the legitimacy of his interrogators or answer their questions and is set to be held for 15 days, a period that can be renewed indefinitely by the authorities.
• Abd El Fattah's targeting is only the latest example of the systematic targeting of journalists, media figures, bloggers and activists by SCAF [the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces],"
• . Part of Egypt's first wave of political bloggers, he and his wife Manal – who is expecting the couple's first child imminently – helped pioneer an online space in which opponents of the Mubarak dictatorship could organise and challenge the regime.
• Since the toppling of Mubarak in February, Abd El Fattah had, like many other revolutionaries, turned his attention to the junta, whose early promises to defend Egypt's revolution and help move the country towards democratic civilian rule have appeared increasingly hollow with each passing month.
• 9 October when violence erupted at a Coptic Christian protest in central Cairo, Abd El Fattah was among those who spoke out against the army's involvement in the violence,
• They [the army] committed a massacre, a horrible crime, and now they are working on framing someone else for it," said Abd El Fattah en route to C28 on Sunday. "This whole situation is distorted. Instead of launching a proper investigation, they are sending activists to trial for saying the plain truth and that is that the army committed a crime in cold blood."

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