Today the Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv gives a vivid insight into how the young Egyptians started using the social web as a vehicle for free expression and revolutionary collaboration.

The death of Khaled Saed

On June 6 2010 the 26 year old business man Khaled Saed (alternative spellings: Said and Saeed) entered an internet-café in Alexandria. Two plain clothes police officers came up to him and asked for an ID. He refused and the two officers started beating him up.

They crushed his head against a marble table and dumped his dead body in a back street. The Egyptian revolution had gotten its most important martyr.

The news of his death spread like wildfire through the social web. Photos of the maltreated Saed proved that the police was lying when they said he had died from swallowing a bag of marijuana when arrested.

A Facebook page set up in his memory, soon gained some 200,000 followers. (There is also an English Facebook and a English web site)

The Arabic Facebook page became a very important meeting place for dissidents. It also helped young Egyptians understand that the regime was based on lies and corruption.

The Egyptian police tried to hunt down the administrator of the page. He restricted his communication to using Google Talk (Google’s Instant Messenger, NSDQ:GOOG) in order to avoid revealing his IP address. He shared his password with a handful of people he trusted, so that someone could take over in case he got detained.

Last week four agents from the secret police kidnapped him from Tahrir square. He was not the first one. Several bloggers were taken from the square or on their way to the square.

Wael Ghonim

The secret administrator turned out to be the Google Marketing Director for the Middle East and North Africa, Wael Ghonim.

After being released by the Secretary General of the NDP party he got his own Facebook page, soon getting some 130,000 friends. A Google employee had become a spokes person for the revolution.

The revolutionaries had tried to get around the Internet blockage by using old fashioned telephone modems connecting via phone numbers abroad.

Now Google and Twitter engineers decided to help by establishing Speak to Tweet, a service that lets activists phone in their tweets, and listen to the ones of others.

Long training

One very interesting aspect of the Egyptian revolution is that the young Internet users had trained for it extensively.

They had learned from the Iranian revolution the need for high quality imagery and video that could capture the world’s imagination. The Iranians had provided video of rather low quality, unsuited for prime time television.

The Egyptian revolutionaries organized themselves into threes. One took care of the video camera, being trained in how to get a good and steady shot, one worked as a “spotter” and one as a “runner”. The runner would bring the memory card out from the Tahrir square to well prepared exits.

The material was then given to TV stations like CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera.

The demonstrations were planned in closed chat rooms. The word to march to Tahrir square was given via twitter. By the time the authorities decided to close down Internet access in Egypt, it was already too late. The plans were in place.

International help

The activists had gotten help from NGOs like Cyber Dissisent, according to Dagens Næringsliv. A Kenyan software producer was hired to expand the online capacity of the revolutionaries, while Italian anarchists helped them get around the governments Internet walls.

The idea was to use this knowledge after the November 2010 elections, but the revolution did not erupt until the Tunisians overthrew their dictator in January this year.

Sandmonkey

We’ve heard TV commentators struggle with putting a face on the young revolution. Who are the leaders? they ask.

It seems the revolutionaries deliberately avoided the development of hierarchy in order to make them less vulnerable from government attacks. Some of the operatives may stay unknown.

One of the most famous activists, however, was the blogger Sandmonkey, who was arrested during the bloody battle of Tahrir Square. When he got out again he decided to go public, telling the world that he was in fact the business man Mahmoud Salem.

Given that his mother had been a parliamentarian for the government party NDP, he had decided to blog incognito. Now he revealed his secret identity. One of the independent channels dared to air an interview with him, showing more Egyptians that the regime were actively mistreating dissidents.

The interview boosted the ranks of the protesters and made it even harder for the other stations to keep on presenting the protesters as foreign agents.

Lessons learned

It has become fashionable to say that the Internet is as much a tool for authoritarian suppression as a vehicle for freedom. There is some truth in this.

Still, the Egyptian revolution must bring fear into the hearts of dictators all over the world. If you combine a young, educated middle class with the internet, you have a ticking bomb waiting to go off.

You can avoid this scenario by keeping the population poor and uneducated, but if you do that you will be unable to deliver the economic growth that may legitimize your regime.

You can also try to avoid the revolution by severely restricting Internet usage. But that is hard, as the Web is now an indispensable part of any business. Moreover, if you want an innovative and knowledge intensive industry, you need to let the population get access to relevant information.

The Chinese government has done its best to restrict news from Egypt, so as not to give their own young middle class the wrong idea.

Google is not officially endorsing Wael Ghonim’s role in the revolution, but their involvement in the development of Speek to Tweet speaks volumes.

The Chinese Communist Party must now witness their multinational industrial enemy No.1, Google, contribute to a revolution in the most influential country in the Middle East. This means that one of the most powerful Internet companies in the world is contributing to the development of technologies that let dissidents get around the fences put up by dictators.

Twitter and Facebook are doing so just by existing.

This is going to be a very interesting century!

See also Wired Trolls Pounce on Facebook’s Tahrir Square
Who is Wael Ghonim? CBC

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