loretta chatmon's List: 3.6 Digital Citizenship

• One of those tools is a set of Android-based apps which allow for encrypted communications. Tools which any of us could use.

• As Andy Greenberg at Forbes' Firewall blog reports, a company called Whisper Systems has released new, Egypt-specific versions of two existing Android applications: RedPhone, an encrypted voice-over-Internet calling app, and TextSecure, an app which encrypts text messages.

• "Under Egyptian legislation the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it," Vodafone, one of the largest cell phone carriers, in Egypt, said in a statement. 

• "Most of the folks who are tweeting are kind of the digital elite who can set up proxy servers and Twitter clients and get their message out," he says. "It only takes a few thousand of those folks to feed the rest of us news about what's going on."

• "It's freedom of expression that is a long-standing core right," Neil Hicks, international policy adviser for Human Rights First, told msnbc.com. "Restriction from the Internet is a violation of the right of free speech."
• "The Internet and social networking that it permits have enabled activists to get around those traditional forms of censorships

• "While we appreciate that some companies involved have acknowledged their role, events unfolding across the region underscore how critical it is for companies operating in these risky environments to have robust strategies to push back on government demands inconsistent with rule of law and respect for human rights."

1 more annotation...

• • digital commerce 

• Egypt's government must return Internet access to the country by Monday or perhaps suffer massive economic damage, as banks and other economic institutions return to work without the ability to conduct commerce.

• "If you go beyond the weekend, real damage is done to capital flow and banking," Neil Hicks, international policy analyst for Human Rights First told msnbc.com, citing a report from the Economist Intelligence Unit. Egypt is part of the world's financial infrastructure, he said. "That's probably why most governments don't do this — it hurts the state and hurts the economy."
• Cutting off the Internet is "damaging your own prospects for prosperity and growth."

• Given the amount of damage likely to be sustained by not just the protesters but the ruling party if the Internet remains down Monday, perhaps the outage will end soon. If not, Egypt could be in even more trouble than it is now.

3 more annotations...

• Egypt and elsewhere in the Mid-East heavily relied on the Internet, social media and technologies like Twitter, TwitPic, Facebook and YouTube in the early stages to accelerate social protest.

• While exact numbers of protesters could not be estimated, a flood of internet photographs and videos showed a massive presence in Cairo, Alexandria, and other Egyptian cities.  These protests lasted 18 days and Internet-savvy protesters used Twitpic, Facebook and YouTube to disseminate videos and photographs and called on Egyptians to protest.  Protesters provided minute-by-minute tweets concerning where to assemble in an effort to outwit police.

   

• “More than 90,000 people signed up on a Facebook page for the Tuesday [Jan. 25] protests, framed by the organizers as a stand against torture, poverty, corruption and unemployment. But the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s most powerful opposition movement, said it would not officially participate, though some of its members joined the protesters in Cairo.”  (NY Times, “Broad Protests Across Egypt Focus Fury on Mubarak“, 1/25/11)

   
• [D]uring protests on Tuesday [Jan. 25, 2011] and again on Wednesday [Jan. 26], many reported trouble accessing Facebook and Twitter, the social networking sites that helped organize and spread news of the protests.”

2 more annotations...

• Anonymous, a loosely defined group of hackers from all over the world, gathered about 500 supporters in online forums and used software tools to bring down the sites of the Ministry of Information and President Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party, said Gregg Housh, a member of the group who disavows any illegal activity himself. The sites were unavailable Wednesday afternoon.

• Tweets

• UPDATED - For those stuck in Egypt without the Internet, Google, Twitter and SayNow have teamed up to create an innovative voicemail system: Call a number and leave a message, and the system blasts it out into the universe in the form of a tweet with the hashtag #egypt.

• • group text

• 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.

• According to TechCrunch, Penner had one of his employees set up the "Egypt4Peace" group, which can be joined here or by texting "Egypt4Peace" to (617) 394-1386.

1 more annotation...

• • Egypt turned off the internet to egyptians!

• On Jan. 27, just before the Egyptian government turned off the Internet for all Egyptians, Facebook saw six times more traffic than Google inside the country. Then came the outage. Then came the protests. Two weeks later, and with relatively little bloodshed, the 30-year government of Hosni Mubarak ended. It's indisputable that the Internet and social media played a pivotal role. In fact, the revolution may not have happened without them.

• Where there had been scattered planning, mostly in secret — the WikiLeaks document was not even clear whether or not the "sensitive" revolutionary plan was on the Internet — there was now public online gathering. The page served as an independent monitor of the November and December 2010 parliamentary elections, considered by many to be fraudulent. Anger built, as did the popularity of Facebook and Twitter as a means to vent that anger.

  • there digital rights!
• The relatively poor country of 10 million had 4 million Internet users; restrictions were not enough to stop the social-media-fueled upheaval.
• Egyptian activists, perhaps prodded by the success of the Tunisian revolt, used Facebook to organize a demonstration that started on Jan. 25. The Khaled Said page and the page run by the April 6 Youth Movement, itself with tens of thousands of followers, both advertised the protests, news of which also blew through Twitter and over mobile phones via SMS.

• "It's like the entire Internet forgot where Egypt was," explained Jim Cowie, CTO of Renesys, an Internet monitoring firm. "The packets we were sending asking for Egyptian Web pages just didn't have a destination." Egypt holds the dubious honor of being the first country to shut off its Internet, cutting off about 20 million people, a quarter of the nation's population.

• No outside Internet traffic — or even through traffic — was affected, but communications to and from Egypt were silenced. One lonely ISP called Noor chugged along, providing limited access to essential services for Egypt's government and major businesses, but even that powered down a few days later.

• Though it was likely achieved through a combination of system shutdowns and data re-routing or blocking, it was remarkably clean. Cell phone and landline voice service continued, but SMS text messaging was also disabled.

• On Monday, Feb. 1, a service called SpeakToTweet, launched by Google and Twitter, brought voices of Net-deprived Egyptians to the global forum of Twitter by way of a phone number. Just like regular voicemail, people could call and leave a message.

  • Speak to tweet gave them back there voice!

• The system was heralded as a wondrous workaround, and a symbol of Internet ingenuity triumphing over real world adversity. But it had problems. If you didn't speak Arabic, you probably couldn't understand a word of the messages, which came through to Twitter anonymous and almost completely unmarked. But thanks to another dose of Internet ingenuity, another group, Small World News, created a site called Alive In Egypt that posted the translations of the tweets, along with the original audio.

• "It just shows you that human networks are much older than computer networks, and are much more resilient," Renesys' Cowie told me. "People will find a way around everything."

  • great example of digital literacy!
• How do you make everybody care?" asks Cowie. "Turn off the Internet."

10 more annotations...

• "This is the revolution of the youth of the internet, and now the revolution of all Egyptians."
• • Facebook and twitter revolution!

• Having grown up on such empty descriptions, it's not surprising that we're hearing so much today about Egypt's "Facebook revolution" or its "Twitter revolution."

• The role of the internet in Egypt's revolution has definitely been overstated. If you look at the available data on the degree of internet penetration in the country as well as the number of mobile cellular subscriptions per 100 people, the percentage of population under age 15 and the degree of urbanization, some intriguing facts jump out.

  <!--startclickprintexclude-->                                                           
• Without the relatively free arena of online social networking sites ... young Egyptians like Ghonim could not have built the resilient and creative force that finally toppled Hosni Mubarak. 
  

• The internet has made a big difference in Egypt. For years, the country's secret police and state-controlled media have very effectively suppressed most dissident activities. Without the relatively free arena of online social networking sites and tools like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, young Egyptians like Ghonim could not have built the resilient and creative force that finally toppled Hosni Mubarak.

4 more annotations...