AP Photo/Ben Curtis
Egyptian anti-government activists clash with riot police in Cairo, Egypt, Friday, Jan. 28, 2011.
This morning we awoke to images of massive protests in Cairo calling for the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a man who has served as the country’s president since October 1981. Other significant mobilizations of popular dissent have occurred in Alexandria, Suez and El Arish. Where this expression of discontent is headed, nobody knows. That’s the thing about revolutions; they tend to be quite revolutionary in being different from one another. No revolution has yet taken place in Cairo, but according to news reports, security forces are expending tear gas and rubber bullets in massive quantities to drive the movement to ground. While I would never profess to be an Arabist or expert on Middle Eastern politics, allow me to weigh in on one aspect of the Egyptian disturbances: that regarding media, information and technology.
Clearly there are thematic points of connection between the Tunisian “Jasmine Revolution” and the current upheaval in Cairo. Economic prospects for young Egyptians, even those holding university degrees, are not good. What is different about the current generation of Egyptian youth (like their Tunisian contemporaries) is that they are globally interconnected. By smart phone, via satellite television and through cyber café, young Egyptians are able to see the world in through outlets other than state-run media. The New York Times has encapsulated this phenomenon and the state response well:
“Images of the lowly challenging the mighty have been relayed from one capital to the next, partly through the aggressive coverage of Al Jazeera. social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have given the protesters a potent weapon, enabling them to elude the traditional police measures to monitor and curb dissent. But various regimes have fallen back on a more traditional playbook, relying on security forces to face angry demonstrators on the streets.”
Egypt’s response has not only been with the baton, gas and rubber bullet. Its internal security forces are not fools when it comes to controlling the information dimension of internal security. Cell phone carriers have been ordered to curtail operations and Internet connectivity across the country is now largely out. The routers than connect Egypt’s piece of the Internet to the world are now largely closed. Wired’s Spencer Ackerman explains:
“The past four days’ worth of protests in Egypt, spurred by those that dethroned the Tunisian government on Jan. 14, have been accelerated by social media. The #Jan25 hashtag gave the leaderless revolt an internal organizing tool and global communications reach. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the Mubarak regime responded by ordering the withdrawal of over 3,500 Border Gateway Protocol routes by Egyptian service providers, shutting down approximately 88 percent of the country’s Internet access, according to networking firm BGPMon.”
In engaging this comprehensive shutdown of Internet connectivity, Egypt is taking a page from the Ahmadenijad government’s playbook put into place after the widespread Iranian protests to the country’s contested 2009 presidential election. This presents a difficult problem for American foreign policy. Secretary Clinton’s address on Internet freedom spelled out clearly U.S. policy regarding the censorship of information distributed via the Web. This is an easy thing to stand for with regard to Iran, a state-sponsor of terrorism with nuclear ambitions, but what of Egypt — the heavyweight of the Arab world, a nation which has held a lasting peace with Israel for more than three decades and remains a stalwart ally of the United States?
We do not know what the Internet-enabled Arab revolutions will produce in their wake. We have not enough data on hand to determine if the cyber cafés of Cairo, Amman or Casablanca are vehicles for democratic reform and civil society or digital madrasahs that send messages to discontented publics that theocratic, anti-Western regimes are a preferable choice. Let us hope the socially networked of Egypt believe in moderation, tolerance and peace.
Christopher Bronk is the Baker Institute fellow in information technology policy. He previously served as a career diplomat with the United States Department of State on assignments both overseas and in Washington, D.C.