Revolution Watch: Tracking Digital Activism in Northern Africa and the Middle East | techPresident

[Last updated: Friday, Jan. 28th, 7:15 p.m. EST]

With things happening remarkably quickly in northern Africa and the Middle East, with protests against governments happening in Tunis, Egypt, and now Yemen, we've decided to try a different (for us) way of covering the developments, with a liveblog of sorts that's tracking all the different news bits, images, videos, observations and more that connect in some way to the central idea that people are using digital tools and media in these historic resistance moments in ways well worth trying to understand. "Revolution Watch" here isn't meant in the political sense, necessarily, but in the new and newish way that citizens -- and, by all means, governments -- are making use of everything from Twitter to blogs to to email to YouTube to Flickr to digital cameras to broadband to mobile phones to shape the worlds in which they exist. So let's get started. We'll be updating the post in reverse chronological order, and all items are stamped with eastern U.S. time. We'd love to hear what you're seeing, hearing, and thinking, so by all means get in touch.

Friday, January 28th

[7:15 p.m. -- Obama Speaks] A short while ago, President Obama delivered remarks on Egypt from the White House State Dining Room that lasted less than five minutes. Just thirty seconds in, after calling on Egyptian authories to resist engaging in violence, Obama began leading into a call for the Mubarak government to turn the Internet and cell phone networks in their country back on. Obama:

The people of Egypt have rights that are universal. That includes the right to to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny. These are human rights, and the human states will stand up for them everywhere.

I also call upon the Egyptian government to reverse the actions they've taken to interfere with access to the Internet, to cell phone service, and to social networks that do so much to connect people in the 21st century.

That language, of the Internet access framed in the context of "rights," not unexpectedly echoes remarks that White House press secretary Robert Gibbs during an afternoon press briefing.

"Supressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away," said Obama later in his remarks.

Obama also made a pitch for, well, open and responsive government. "Around the world," said Obama, "governments have an obligation to respond to their citizens. That's true here in the United States. That's true in Asia. It is true in Europe. It is true in Africa. And it is certainly true in the Arab world, where a new generation of citizens has a right to be heard. When I was in Cairo, shortly after I was elected president, I said that all governments must 'maintain power through consent, not coercion.' That is the single standard by which the people of Egypt will achieve the future they deserve."

[4:37 p.m. -- Twitter Says "The Tweets Must Flow"]  On Twitter's company blog, the California-based company's co-founder Biz Stone posts a note sketching out a company stand on free expression (they're pro), a position that "carries with it a mandate to protect our users' right to speak freely and preserve their ability to contest having their private information revealed." The full post:

Our goal is to instantly connect people everywhere to what is most meaningful to them. For this to happen, freedom of expression is essential. Some Tweets may facilitate positive change in a repressed country, some make us laugh, some make us think, some downright anger a vast majority of users. We don't always agree with the things people choose to tweet, but we keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content.

The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. This is both a practical and ethical belief. On a practical level, we simply cannot review all one hundred million-plus Tweets created and subsequently delivered every day. From an ethical perspective, almost every country in the world agrees that freedom of expression is a human right. Many countries also agree that freedom of expression carries with it responsibilities and has limits.

At Twitter, we have identified our own responsibilities and limits. There are Tweets that we do remove, such as illegal Tweets and spam. However, we make efforts to keep these exceptions narrow so they may serve to prove a broader and more important rule—we strive not remove Tweets on the basis of their content. For more on what we allow and what we don't, please see this help page.

Our position on freedom of expression carries with it a mandate to protect our users' right to speak freely and preserve their ability to contest having their private information revealed. While we may need to release information as required by law, we try to notify Twitter users before handing over their information whenever we can so they have a fair chance to fight the request if they so choose.

We continue to work towards further transparency when we remove Tweets for legal reasons. We submit all copyright removal notices to @chillingeffects and they are now Tweeting them from @ChillFirehose. We will continue to increase our transparency in this area and encourage you to let us know if you think we have not met our aspirations with regard to your freedom of expression.

Discussion on topics from geopolitical events to wardrobe malfunctions make Twitter both important and fun. Providing the tools that foster these discussions and following the policies that keep them alive is meaningful work for us. If you are interested in this topic, we encourage you to follow the accounts collected @twitter/freedom-of-expression or better yet, come work with us.

[4:27 p.m. -- Historic? Yes. Without Precedent? No.]  

Egyptians, we now all know, has been largely cut off from the Internet while that country engages in protests against the Mubarak government. The chart to the right has been floating around the Internet over the last day or so, pointing out clearly the extent to which Internet traffic to and from Egypt has dropped off since the government, it seems, ordered a shutdown of most Internet providers. (This chart is actually an update to an earlier version, showing that not much has changed today; both charts were put together by the Massachusetts based Arbor Networks.)

But Masashi Crete-Nishihata and Jillian York of the OpenNet Initiative, a project that tracks the state of the open Internet around the globe, report that while the Egyptian Internet blackout is dramatic, concerning, and in its own way historic, it's not entirely something the world has never seen before:

Shutting down Internet connectivity in reaction to sensitive political events is an extreme example of just-in-time blocking — a phenomenon in which access to information is denied during important political moments when the content may have the greatest potential impact such as elections, protests, or anniversaries of social unrest.

What is happening in Egypt is not without precedent: two other states have implemented national level Internet shutdowns in reaction to political events. In February 2005 Nepal severed all international Internet connections in the country following a declaration of martial law by the King. On September 29, 2007 during the Saffron Revolution the Burmese government completely shut down Internet connectivity in the country in reaction to streams of images and videos documenting the violent government crackdown on the protests uploaded by citizens. Prior to shutting down the Internet, the Burmese government had — not unlike the recent actions by the Egyptian government — increased the number of sites they were blocking, extending the ban to popular social media like YouTube and Blogspot, as well as international news sites. In the case of Burma the apparent objective of the shutdown was to restrict information from flowing out of the country to wider international audiences. What differentiates Egypt from both previous cases is that the government does not have control of the Internet from a central location; rather, ISPs were ordered by the government to shut down service.

At the risk of reading too much into their post, the subtext seems to be that while what's happening in Egypt is certainly attention-grabbing, the restrictions on the Internet we see in other times and other place are deserving of at least a fraction of that same attention.

[3:54 p.m. -- Gibbs: Internet Connectivity is "Basic Individual Right"]

In a White House press conference just now, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs was asked about Vodafone Egypt, the company that completely cut off Egyptians' access of mobile communications via their network yesterday after, says the company, being directed to by the Egyptian government.

Gibbs wouldn't comment on Vodafone's specific actions, saying he'd have to "go to the NSC," or National Security Council, on the particulars of that situation. But he did comment on how the Obama administration is looking at connections to the Internet these days:

It is our strong belief that inside of the framework of basic individual rights are the rights of those to have access to the Internet and to sites for open communications and social networking.

In a strict reading, the response from Gibbs -- who was being extraordinarily careful throughout the briefing -- is a fairly powerful statement of the importance of the right to digital connection provided by the Internet, framing it language generally used to refer to human rights.

[3:02 p.m. -- Capturing Kasr Al Nil] There's a striking photograph being passed around Twitter this afternoon that shows Egyptian protesters on Cairo's Kasr Al Nil Bridge, which connects with Tahrir Square, being hosed by some unseen source while kneeling down in prayer. Have a look:

The photo which, echos some of the "hosing" visual imagery we talked about down blog, was posted on a Twitter account under the name Olly Wainwright. Attached to the photo was the simple note, "from my friend in Cairo." Since going up on the Twitter-inspired photo-sharing site TwitPic about four hours ago, it's been viewed more than 70,000 times.

Some of those views, perhaps, have come by way of the New Yorker, where what seems to be the independently-shot photo has been called into service to flesh out a moment detailed by writer Jenna Krajeski, who is reporting from on the ground in Cairo. The photo provides the backstory for a subsequent stretch of time that Krajeski describes in depth:

Kasr Al Nil bridge, which connects downtown’s Tahrir Square with Gezirah’s Opera Square in Cairo, was the setting for the climax of today’s enormous anti-government protests, with hordes of police officers trying to prevent tens of thousands of protesters from crossing into downtown. On Friday afternoon, the protesters, braving tear gas and singing the Egyptian National Anthem, made it about a third of the way across before they were pushed back to Opera Square, where they seemed to disperse. After that, the bridge emptied. Police vans parked along the side, and some officers sat, exhausted, on the curb, their shields lying on the ground and visors pushed up over their black helmets. A few officers ran on the bridge toward Tahrir Square, calling over and over again for an ambulance. The pavement was slick and wet—water cannons had been used against the crowd. Black smoke rose up from behind the Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square, and just north, on the 6th of October Bridge, something was on fire. The loud, constant crack of tear-gas grenades being fired in Opera Square could be heard in the hotel across the water, where I waited with my colleagues from Al-Masry Al-Youm, an Arabic and English newspaper. Two army trucks, stuffed with soldiers, rolled over the bridge to Tahrir. Kasr Al Nil, at that point, belonged to the police.

You can read the rest of Krajeski's first-hand report from Cairo here. In it, she conveys what she heard from one contingent of Egyptians on why they're resisting their current situation, and what might be next: "There was no work and nothing to eat, Mubarak had to go, their hope for the future was freedom and, maybe, ElBaradei."

[2:03 p.m. -- Anonymous "Will Take Sides"] On the news website of Anonymous, the global digital collective that has been in the news most recently for bringing down government websites in Tunisia, a press release has been posted in response to the events in Egypt. (That's a tortured way of not saying "an official Anonymous press release," given that the site, though moderated, is open to postings from anyone who might like to add one.) It comes in the form of a letter, and it's addressed to "governments of the world":

Your support of the popular uprisings in Arabic countries has been ambiguous, if not  absent altogether. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton exemplified the indecisiveness of the international community as she claimed that the US "could not take sides". Neutrality amounts to complicity as totalitarian regimes are showing their contempt for the citizens' right to protest. Mubarak's regime attempted to disconnect the Egyptian people from the rest of the world by cutting off internet communication, while his foot soldiers shot civilians and assaulted domestic and international journalists.
 
It is up to you to work for the people and support the universal right to freedom of speech. It is your prerogative to oppose violent regimes, regardless of your political affiliation. The geopolitical concerns for 'stability' have for far too long served as an excuse to ignore the violations of human rights.
 
People throughout the Arab world have been victimized and held hostage by 
their regimes. Now the people are standing up. The current situation within Egypt presents the leadership of the world with a unique opportunity to acknowledge and respect the people's ambition to control its own future. This is also the time when the question will finally be answered, once and for all: are Western governments truly "of, by, and for the people" or are they merely puppet facades, designed to ensure the continued domination by those in power?
 
Anonymous has made its choice. We will take sides. We will support people who strive for freedom of speech, assembly and communication - the civil rights essential for the people to forge their own futures.

(Housekeeping note: This item was reposted from earlier today after an unfortunate overwriting error occurred.)

[1:32 a.m. -- Inside the Oval Office] The Obama White House posts to its Flickr feed a Pete Souza photo showing President Obama discussing the situation in Egypt during his 9:30 a.m. Presidential Daily Briefing today:

The White House regularly puts a rush on getting its in-house photos posted on its Flickr feed when it especially wants to capture a moment or help shape the public perception of the White House's role in events. And there's no doubt that Egypt's "Day of Anger" is a significant moment for the Obama administration. One wonders, though, if this scene, of scores of men in suits looking quite relaxed (except, perhaps, the National Security Council's Ben Rhodes, bottom right) hits exactly the note that the White House might have hoped it to.

[1:15 a.m. -- Routing Egypt]

RIPE NCC, a membership-based organization that monitors and supports the Internet's infrastructure, has found occasion in Egypt to test out its new RIPEstate portal, designed to help analyze "interesting incidents in Internet operations." Here's what it found in Egypt:

This page shows a regularly updated overview of the routing activity observed for prefixes allocated to Egyptian organisations.

The graph shows Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) updates which occur when routers announce changes in routing. The top half shows announcements and changes, while the bottom half shows withdrawals which occur when routers inform each other that a range of addresses is no longer reachable.

Prior to 22:00 on 27th January, the graph displays the normal background noise of BGP updates for Egyptian prefixes - hovering around 200-400 announcements per minute.

Clearly visible after 22:00 is the huge spike in updates and withdrawals when many Egyptian prefixes were withdrawn from the Internet.

(Via Kombiz Lavasany)

[12:41 a.m. -- Clinton Condemns Communications Cut-Off]

Al Jazeera just broke into their on-going Cairo coverage with remarks from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on the Egypt situation. In them, Clinton -- annunciating to an almost painful extent -- expressed support for the Egyptian people while cautioning against violent protests. Alas, Clinton's remarks aren't yet up on the State Department website. But Clinton was recorded making these remarks about the historic Internet cut-off we've seen occur in Egypt:

"We urge the Egyptian authorities to allow peaceful protests and reverse the unprecedented steps it has taken to cut off communications."

The United States, as you've no doubt heard by now, counts Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak as an ally in the Middle East, and we've seen the Obama administration attempting to finesse support for the anti-repression protests that have erupted in Cairo, Suez, and elsewhere over the last three days with that political relationship. One thing that the Obama administration can cling to is the rights of the Egyptian people to organize and express themselves online, and in a way, the Mubarak government's drastic cut-off gave U.S. officials, from their perspective, a useful instance of offensive behavior to focus on.

To wit, the first mention of Egypt made by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on his Twitter feed makes a point of bringing up the blocking of the Internet in Egypt, including restrictions on Twitter and Facebook:

via techpresident.com

Posted via email from Brian's posterous