CAIRO: A huge poster appeared in downtown Cairo’s central Tahrir Square recently, not long after April 6.
“Young people love Egypt, it declares next to an image of a delicate sapling held in a cupped pair of hands. “El shebab el gadd yebny be kol gohd, (young people who mean business use all their efforts to build) we are told.
It is little wonder that Tahrir Square was chosen to host this message: frequently the scene of political protest, in the early morning of April 6 the square was transformed into a military barracks.
Central security trucks and teargas-launcher toting soldiers were deployed both in the square and throughout downtown Cairo, in anticipation of demonstrators answering the call for a general strike against a range of ills; corruption, police torture and skyrocketing inflation are just some of them.The overwhelming – and fractious – security presence in downtown Cairo successfully prevented all signs of protest other than a carefully-managed and contained demonstration on the steps of the Lawyers’ Syndicate.
Cairo’s streets were noticeably emptier of traffic and people on April 6, which some commentators seized on as evidence that the call for the strike had got through.
Ironically however, it is televised Interior Ministry threats of “immediate and firm measures against anyone involving themselves in protests which seem to have scared many into staying home, and keeping their children at home.
It is the way in which the call for the strike was made, rather than the response to it, which is in any case the most remarkable aspect of April 6: what began as a call for industrial action in the Ghazl El-Mahalla spinning factory, Mahalla, soon expanded.
The call was adopted by opposition groups and internet activists, resulting in an online campaign for a strike. Thousands joined the ‘April 6: a general strike for the people of Egypt’ group on the social-networking website, Facebook, and it currently has over 73,000 members.
These Shebab El-Facebook soon became the target of attacks in the state-run press, accused of being a fifth column bent on destruction – an unsurprising reaction from a regime which has consistently demonstrated its distrust of organized opposition blocs of any kind.
The Tahrir Square poster is seen as a thinly disguised reference to – or reprimand of – Facebook activists who called for the April 6 strike.
Unlike trade unions and opposition political parties however, the internet has proved something of a more intractable ‘enemy’: the anonymity of its users, combined with the visibility of measures taken to curb internet freedom has proved to be something of a conundrum for the Egyptian government, constantly trying to maintain a balance between quietly and clumsily quashing dissent while preserving an international image of Egypt as an investor-friendly, stable, democracy.
While Egypt ostensibly has a progressive internet policy, in its 2005 report on internet access in Egypt, ‘False Freedom’ Human Rights Watch quotes a government representative who said that website blocking is simultaneously “unregulated by the authorities and subject to executive authority regulations “concerning sites that threaten the safety and security of society within the framework of existing laws.
However, as Human Rights Watch points out, no “existing laws allow the government to block websites.
In practice this means a discreet word in the ear of internet service providers (ISPs).
Blogger and software technician Alaa Abd El Fattah told Daily News Egypt that he has witnessed two methods of website blocking in Egypt, domain server name poisoning and IP address blocking – both of which are carried out by ISPs at the router level, and both of which “are haphazard and without any clear legal process or official records.
“Of course the ISPs are not making these decisions on their own, Abd El Fattah said.
“They are probably responding to orders by state security but there is no legal process or official paperwork.
A computer technician who works for an Egyptian ISP and who preferred to remain anonymous confirms that ISPs block websites by blocking the Domain Name Service (which changes human-readable website names into computer-readable IP addresses).
The technician confirms that orders to block websites are always given informally, and are normally given verbally, in person.
Abd El Fattah says that website blocking is still “very rare in Egypt and that the response of ISPs to orders to block websites is “not uniform.
“Sometimes they block a website for only a short period of time – even 24hours – and sometimes the response by the ISPs is not uniform.
“For instance harakamasria.org the Kefaya [opposition movement] website was blocked on May 4 [when a call for another general strike was made] but most ISPs then unblocked it at the end of the day, but it seems it is still blocked by TEData.
In its 2007 report on freedom of expression in Egypt the Arab Network for Human Rights Information (HRInfo) refers to the banning of only one website, www.saveegyptfront.org, which it says was “partially banned in January 2006 before being unblocked in 2007.
HRInfo explains this by suggesting that “the Egyptian government learnt the lesson that banning a website increases its popularity.
According to the report, the authorities resorted to more traditional techniques of suppressing online dissent such as the arrest and detention of bloggers.
Facebook April 6 group administrator Israa Abdel Fattah became an unwilling cause célèbre after she was arrested and detained on April 6 for more than two weeks.
She emerged from prison, blinking into the light of a media frenzy to declare that she had made a mistake, and had repented.
Another group administrator, Ahmed Maher was kidnapped while driving his car in a Cairene suburb before allegedly being beaten intermittently by State Security Investigations for 12 hours. He was eventually released without charge.
Maher used Facebook to support calls for the May 4 general strike.He told Human Rights Watch that his assailants asked for the password of the Facebook group and questioned him about members of the group he had never met.
Responses such as these are significant. They indicate an acknowledgement by the authorities of the extent to which young people – simultaneously disenfranchised by a moribund political scene and penned in by draconian exceptional laws – have carved out an influential space for themselves online.
Abd El Fattah thinks that the authorities’ response is business as usual.”Just because the regime is taking extreme measures against cyber activists doesn’t mean they fear them.
“This is simply how they deal with activists no matter what the threat level is, and it’s always been like that.
In a June 2 LA Times Op Ed, one commentator, Sherif Mansour, writes that the authorities are gearing up for a “showdown with Facebook. He suggests that President Hosni Mubarak is considering blocking it.Abd El Fattah thinks this is unlikely.
“They will not block something as popular as Facebook unless it’s part of a huge crackdown that also involves shutting down newspapers and TV stations and large mass arrests.
He also suggests that, ever keen to preserve an image of legitimacy and due process, the authorities will use the law to justify a crackdown if it happened.
“They’ll have to either come up with some legal cover – a new law or a court
order from a higher court – or they’ll have abandoned the legal processaltogether.
Abd El Fattah suggests that there is currently a tug of war going on between pro and anti-censorship camps within the regime.
“I’d say one camp inside the regime recognizes that more censorship will hardly achieve anything and another camp thinks they just need to exert more control.
“The haphazard blocking that does or doesn’t happen is probably the resultof pushing and shoving between these two camps.
