Egypt Sphinxed by Internet

Egypt's President, General Intelligence Service and military have been outgunned by bloggers, Facebook and Twitter.

As revealed last November in Wikileak's dump of diplomatic cables, Egypt's bloggers were poised to engage the country's younger, disaffected urban population.  According to 09CAIRO544 (redacted):

"Egypt has an estimated 160,000 bloggers who write in Arabic, and sometimes in English, about a wide variety of topics, from social life to politics to literature. One can view posts ranging from videos of alleged police brutality (ref B), to comments about the GOE’s foreign policy, to complaints about separate lines for men and women in government offices distributing drivers’ licenses. One NGO contact estimated for us that a solid majority of bloggers are between 20 and 35 years old, and that about 30 percent of blogs focus on politics. Blogs have spread throughout the population to become vehicles for a wide range of activists, students, journalists and ordinary citizens to express their views on almost any issue they choose. As such, the blogs have significantly broadened the range of topics that Egyptians are able to discuss publicly."

Facebook played a key role too.  Wael Ghonim, an Egyptian Google product manager in Dubai, was responsible for setting up the Facebook page "We Are All Khaled Said," now with 500,000 members, as well as the campaign web site for opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei and ElBaradei's Facebook account.

After the most recent Tahrir Square protests began Ghonim posted on his Facebook page:

• "I said one year ago that the Internet will change the political scene in Egypt and some Friends made fun of me :)"

A day or so later Ghonim tweeted:

• "Revolution can be a Facebook event that is liked, shared and tweeted."

Ghomim was taken into custody last week by Egypt's General Intelligence Services but was reportedly scheduled to be released.

In the latest Wonderland column in The Wall Street Journal, Dan Henninger contends that social media has ushered in a new era of political instability:

"In 2007, Egypt sentenced a blogger named Kareem Amer to four years in prison for insulting the president. Ten years ago, Mr. Amer would have simply disappeared, like all the others. So what if his family and 15 friends grumbled? Stability.

"Not now. Instead, Mr. Amer became an icon of regime repression. What changed? Instead of 15 friends whispering over coffee in a café, 15,000 can talk to each other all day and every day via Internet cafés about who's getting tortured. According to the Open Net Initiative's helpful country profiles, some one million Egyptian households have broadband access, often sharing lines.

"Think what this means at the crudest level: Huge swaths of any wired population exist in a state of engagement. Instability. Before, stifled populations were mostly sullen. Now, all the time, they're in mental motion.

"Even if the Mubarak thugs somehow disperse the people in the street, they'll return some day because there is no effective way to cap their ability to share grievances on a massive scale. Egypt earlier pulled the plug on its entire Internet. So what? No nation will turn it off forever."

The New York Times' Frank Rich pooh poohed the whole connection between the Cairo protests and the Internet, calling it "simplistic Western chauvinism" that thinks "two great American digital innovations can rescue the downtrodden, unwashed masses."  His NYT colleague Thomas Friedman, who actually travels and knows a thing or two about about the web completely disagrees with him in his most recent column, China, Twitter and 20-Year-Olds vs the Pyramids.

No nation can really just turn off social networking, especially with the explosion of smartphones and texting.  You have to figure Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea, Cuba and other "fear societies" are reassessing their enemies in the cloud.