Arab Media

Freedom House denied entry to Bahrain despite visas

2012-01-22T13:25:00.000-05:00

I was supposed to go to Bahrain tomorrow, with visa approved and flight booked, only to be told that we are not welcome and our trip should be postponed. I was to go with two colleagues from Freedom House for a training that is part of a women's empowerment program that ends in February. Yet the effusively 'polite' letter paid no heed and rather claimed that the Bahrain government is "working on the implementation of the recommendations" of the report by the independent commission (BICI) even though one of those was to let in human rights organizations!

In fact, when the report was released last November, King Hamad said "any Government which has a sincere desire for reform and progress understands the benefit of objective and constructive criticism" - apparently the Bahraini government is not one of them! A copy of the letter is below and a bigger one here. *update: here is the Freedom House press release about it.

In fact, violence has escalated over the weekend, with reports of clashes between mourners and security forces. My thoughts are with all of those peacefully struggling for their rights in Bahrain, please stay safe and know that the world IS watching.

** Update: Please see the story posted by the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, the leading Bahraini group ensuring that monitoring and reporting on human rights abuses in the country occurs and reaches the international community.

Whirlwind Middle East trip, talking, training, tweeting

2012-01-10T23:54:00.001-05:00

I'm getting ready to leave for a two-week jaunt through the Middle East and looking forward to reconnecting with old friends, getting updated on the latest trends in cyberactivism, and meeting some of the amazing women who are using new technology for political and social activism.

My first stop is Cairo, where I'm taking part in the Yahoo! Change Your World summit as moderator of a panel exploring women’s rights, human rights and technology. We'll be looking at the increasingly critical role technology, and the internet in particular, play in amplifying the voices of those advocating for human rights and the advancement of women in society. The panelists include:

Rebecca Chiao, USA/Egypt, co-founder of HarassMap , an online crowdsourcing mapping project created by and for women to track incidents of sexual harassment in Egypt
Fadi Salem, UAE, Fellow and Director of the Governance and Innovation Program in the Dubai School of Government and recent author of the 3rd Arab Social Media Report, which focuses particularly on the gender divide
Raja Althaibani, Yemen/USA, Witness, Middle East and North Africa Program Associate
Dalia Abdelhameed, Egypt, Gender Program Officer at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights

We will be discussing the key issues related to women’s rights, human rights and social justice that women are addressing, and how are they using technology, social/digital media platforms to create solutions and increase awareness of those issues. We will also examine innovative technological and media applications for addressing human rights and social justice issues have emerged. Friend Mona Eltahawy is moderating the summit, so you know it will be good! There are too many amazing women (ok, and men) who are part of the summit to list now but will try to post more details later. In the meantime follow #changeyourworldcairo and check out the agenda

After that I'm headed to Iraq, or more specifically Kurdistan, to do a training for civil society and journalists. I'm really looking forward to this as I have not been in Iraq before, and with the devolving security situation there may be a limited window of opportunity to so safely. Iraq has consistently been ranked among the most dangerous places in the world for journalists and continues to face serious threats to press freedom, and I'm interested to learn more about the situation on the ground.

I will be tweeting as much as possible from the conference (#changeyourworldcairo) and the rest of my travels, follow me on Twitter at @courtneyr

Egyptian Blogger Sentenced by Military Rulers Amid Accusations of Human Rights "Cronyism"

2011-12-17T16:39:00.002-05:00

My latest blog on Huffington Post

Blogger Maikel Nabil was sentenced to two years in prison yesterday, a one-year reduction from his three-year sentence handed down on Apr. 11 by a military tribunal in closed session. Nabil was tried by a military tribunal, despite being a civilian, joining the 12,000 people who have been convicted in such trials since the fall of Mubarak. He was convicted of insulting the army and publishing false news, which is of course ridiculous given the military are currently the political rulers of the transitional country and thus must be susceptible to criticism! Nabil founded the Facebook group No for Compulsory Military Service and has been arrested several times, yet continued to publish by sending hand-written notes from prison to his lawyers to post on his blog. He has also been on a hunger strike for more than 114 days, and his brother, said Nabil, will fast until "dead or released."Of course, Egyptian cyberactivists and citizen journalists are in an uproar, refusing to give up their right to free speech, which they so valiantly fought for, despite the SCAF's threats to take away these rights. Human rights organizations defending Nabil and advocating for his release alleged that his lawyers were tricked, and others cautioned about the dangerous precedent being set. The U.S. also called for his release yesterday, although for some reason the U.S. continues to provide unconditional aid to the military SCAF leaders even though they are consistently violating the fundamental rights of their citizens -- and this in a year of budget cuts and economic hardships in America!

Mikhail Nabil Sanad, picture courtesy of MidEast YouthNabil's mainstream Egyptian media initially ignored his plight, but as this post written by blogger and friend Tarek Amr details, cyberactivists and citizen journalists pressed for the media coverage it deserved. As Rasha Abdullah, an AUC professor and author of a book on the Internet in the Arab world, tweeted: @rashaabdulla: "#MaikelNabil's case is clear message to #Internetactivists. We have to defend #freedom of expression. This is not acceptable. #Egypt #Jan25".
Yet Egypt's cyberactivst community has also come under criticism for failing to galvanize opposition around his case as they have around the arrest and imprisonment of one of the grandfathers of Egyptian cyberactivism, Alaa Abdel Fattah, leading to accusations of "human rights cronyism." According to journalist Joseph Mayton, fewer than 20 people turned out for Nabil's court sessions yet organizers of the #NoMilTrials campaign for Alaa organized a massive march in late October throughout downtown Cairo to put pressure on the military to release him. (Alaa has refused to speak at his trial before a military court that he and many others see as illegitimate and thus unable to compel him to take part, but continues to blog from prison.) Mayton says "[t]he reason could boil down to simple cronyism, but I suspect it is even more intricate than this. Nabil has controversial, and unpopular, ideas on normalization with Israel. As a Coptic Christian, this has been scorned by activists in the country, who have an ardent anti-Israeli sentiment -- and justifiably so."
Alaa Abdel Fattah, courtesy of himselfI disagree with Mayton's argument, however, that human rights groups should not concentrate on highlighting specific cases rather than broader human rights abuses -- this is a technique for making people care about those who are usually very far removed from them and their daily lives. The same technique is used by journalists, who find that person or anecdote that illustrates a broader trend or issue. He also blames this "cronyism" in part on access, which may be somewhat true but doesn't explain the true dynamics, which are far more complex in that they are related to the nature of networks and cyberactivism as it developed in Egypt. The power laws of networks mean that highly connected activists like Alaa, who was one of Egypt's first bloggers, is one of the most highly connected nodes in the Egyptian cybersphere and highly connected to international journalists, rights groups and transnational activist networks. He has more than 71,000 followers on Twitter and has posted more than 112,000 tweets, one of the most connected people in Egypt's cybersphere.
Mayton continues:

"Fattah is friends with the human rights institutions and journalists who report what goes on in Egypt. So, of course he has the upper hand in what is reported and what is advocated. Also, the rights workers understand that he is an international symbol that will galvanise foreign press to intervene and write an article on the situation. It's all PR."

If not for the last snarky comment I would agree; but why does that deserve condemnation? NGOs, journalists and activists have limited resources in terms of time and money, and the public has a limited attention span and are drowning in information. I have similarly written before about the unequal coverage given to highly connected cyberactivists in the post, "Meditations on journalism, cyberactivism and my research", and my PhD dissertation. Alaa spent years building up a transitional cyberactivist network that includes many of Egypt's most prominent activists, but they have not been silent on Nabil and neither have international groups. Which means that as we advocate for the U.S. to put its money where its mouth is with respect to the SCAF, and for the military to respect freedom of expression and opinion, it will benefit each and every person not just those who become poster kids.

Your Webcam is now a Weapon of Mass Communication

2011-12-15T22:55:00.000-05:00

What a great tag line! Talk Back TV Mideast is a video remix/mashup platform that takes aim at state-run media and "video propaganda" in the Middle East by helping users provide commentary (or rants) attached to those media clips. The philosophy of the project is that in the wake of the era of state-media, "robust media commentary tools will be critical to advance democracy and transparency in the region."

A lot of the commentary is political, highlighting cases of military violence, the torture and deaths of activists, voting rights, etc. If you want to learn more but don't understand Arabic, Global Voices has a nice little roundup of one of Khaled Eibid rants on Essam Atta, the 24-year-old Egyptian activist who was tortured and murdered by guards while in detention in a military prison.

According to the description on the site:

TalkBackTVMideast is all about democracy, free speech and transparency. Our goal is to put next generation media commentary tools into the hands of bloggers, journalists, activists, and experts. TalkBackTV is the next step in web-video, content creation and community building. TalkBackTV will turn TV into a two-way conversation - a virtual web driven conversation.

Will Talk Back TV enable the Middle East's Jon Stewart to emerge, strengthen those who would criticize and satirize their political and social (not to mention religious) leaders, promote freedom of expression and free thought? One can hope so!

I like the site's approach to copyright as well, its emphasis on fair use and plea to content owners to facilitate such commentarial use.

Fair Use is the flip side of the copyright coin. The TalkBackTVMideast Platform enables the public to confront, and critique those who control the political, cultural and media power levers.

That’s not just Fair Use..…it’s Fair. I look forward to seeing what becomes of this project.

The astronomical expansion of social media

2011-12-08T20:30:00.000-05:00

I love this infographic about the astronomical growth of social media in the United States (of course I wish we had such data available for the Middle East!)

86% of adults under age 29 use social media

25% of Americans watch a YouTube video every day! (imagine the implications for firms and organizations not visible on YouTube...

Source: The Growth of Social Media: An Infographic

ABC Nightly News? Sounding more like a misnomer every night

2011-12-05T22:09:00.001-05:00

The ABC Nightly News show is pathetic. Two seconds to crying Italian MP who slashed social welfare and 30+ to freaking Tiger Woods?! Really? I'm getting ready to switch networks. nothing on Libya, Tunisia, Egypt. It every night half the newscast goes to inane "human interest" stories when in reality our interest in each other in humans is about empowerment and emancipation, not the happiest woman on earth or the journalistically questionable Made in America, whose idea I support but whose blatant activism I question as a journalistically sound. ABC Nightly News? The news part if the network's name is increasingly dubious and sounds more like a misnomer every night...

Tharwat Mekki officially appointed head of State Radio and Television Union

2011-10-15T13:55:00.000-04:00

Egypt's ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) has officially appointed former VP of the State Radio and Television Union (ERTU) Tharwat Mekki as chairman, a position he had filled since Sami ‎El-Sherif resigned a couple of months ago.‎

Mekki was formerly news manager at the state run television station, and had been criticized for his "authoritarian" ways and particularly the delay in covering the 2005 Khan al-Khalili bombing, attributing the two hour delay in coverage to the fact that his mobile phone was off and therefore he couldn't authorize coverage.

No word yet on what the revolutionary youth movements think of this pick as of yet, though I doubt that this is the type of shake-up they are looking for as they demand improved coverage by Egyptian state media and greater freedom of expression given that he's most certainly part of the "old guard."

Media Futures- Policy, Politics and Power

2011-10-09T12:05:00.000-04:00

I will be speaking tomorrow at the Media Futures- Policy, Politics and Power conference about the business of news and how to monetize social media. In the 20th century we spoke of the 24-hour news cycle with the advent of cable news stations and the internet. But the 21st century news cycle is best measured in minutes, not hours, making this the decade of the 1440 news cycle. The obsession with scoops that has dominated news media for much of its modern history has been amplified in the era of the 1440 news cycle. This accelerated news cycle feeds off mobile, video, and social, once considered by the news business as separate audience or revenue categories but now better understood as dimensions of the convergence phenomenon that is occurring both at the hardware level, with internet-connected mobile phones and other devices like tablets that defy categorization within existing frameworks, as well as the content level, as news becomes multimedia, user-generated and integrated within our social spaces.

Worldwide people spent 110 billion minutes per month on social networks and blogs, with 60% of all mobile internet usage spent on social networking sites. Of these sites, of course, Facebook is by far the most popular with more than half a billion users. Forrester Research predicts that by 2016, social media will be a $4.4 billion industry. And according to Justin Kistner of WebTrends, Facebook currently has 50% of all social market share.

Social media are the building blocks and amplifiers of citizen journalism. Many more people are offering information as a product than ever before in human history, challenging MSM outlets to distinguish themselves in an information-saturated context. Engaging with and collaborating with these social-media empowered citizen journalists is one key to monetizing social media. Now there are legions of people around the world willing to help the MSM better cover their communities, meaning that MSM can spend money training their reporters and editors how to use social media for reporting assess veracity and credibility on social media platforms.

The juxtaposition of the term “citizen,” with its attendant qualities of civic mindedness and social responsibility, with that of “journalism,” which refers to a particular profession, to describe online and digital journalism done by amateurs underscores the link between the practice of journalism and its relation to political community and democracy. Amateur journalism, on the other hand, situates the amateur journalist in the journalistic field and implicates them in the reification of that field and its attendant rules and practical logic. The term citizen journalist, or citizen journalism, however, situates the subject in a field in which civic identity and one’s relationship to the state are implicitly implicated in the practice of journalism.

The conference is the closing event of a four year multi-million dollar European Union media development initiative that aimed to provide training and networking opportunities to media professionals from the southern Mediterranean, Eastern Europe and southern Caucuses through the European Neighbourhood Journalism Network (ENJN).
ENJN Closing Conference from European Journalism Centre on Vimeo.

According to the conference website, more than 200 senior journalists working on European and international affairs along with editor-in-chiefs of major news outlets in the ENPI region are being brought together to discuss the recent developments in the ENP region and media related topics including:

Future of journalism: media policy and democratic legitimacy
Press freedom: the effectiveness of current regulatory policies and instruments
Social media and 2011 revolutions: reshaping world politics
Discussing the business of news: how to monetise social media
Global communications, development and transition
Revised European Neighbourhood Policy

Samira Ahmed (@SamiraAhmedUK) is moderating. Funnily enough, although the focus is on the future of journalism in the era of "new" and social media, the event does not appear to have assigned a hashtag, but I'll be blogging (@courtneyr) as I imagine other panelists like the Economist's Mark Johnson (@majohns), IREX's Leon Morse (@morseln3), Jillian York (@jilliankyork) and James Harkin (@James_Harkin).
** update: the hashtag for today's conference is #ENJN

Twitter latest battleground for NATO v Taliban

2011-10-08T13:01:00.005-04:00

Ten years after the start of the US war in Afghanistan, some battles have taken an odd turn in a country where only 3.4% of the population has internet access. In the latest twist in the war for hearts and minds, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force and his Taliban counterpart have been dueling in 140-character spurts on Twitter over what who's to blame for civilian deaths, which side will most likely win the war, and competing for best use of shorthand. I'm kind of surprised at the level of the Taliban spokesman ability to truncate English while retaining readability!

It all started last month following the Taliban's 20-hour attach on the Green Zone in Kabul that left 9 dead, 23 injured, and millions of dollars of damages:

The Twitter account for the ISAF spokesman, @ISAFmedia, unwittingly triggered the Twitter throw-down by posing this rhetorical question in response to a defiant statement from a Taliban spokesman issued via traditional channels: "Re: Taliban spox on #Kabul attack: the outcome is inevitable. Question is how much longer will terrorist put innocent Afghans in harm's way?"

To ISAF's surprise, a Taliban spokesman identifying himself as Abdulqahar Balk, Twitter handle @Abalkhi, responded in good text-ese: "@ISAFmedia i dnt knw.u hve bn pttng thm n ‘harm's way' fr da pst 10 yrs.Razd whole vllgs n mrkts.n stil hv da nrve to tlk bout ‘harm's way'."

You can read a fuller account of the exchange here. Looks like Abalkhi is relatively new to Twitter, he only has about 500 tweets, but a lot more followers (perhaps he got a bump as a result of the media attention over the dueling tweets?). His profile description includes a link to a news site Voice of Jihad and his tweets are mainly news links with anti-American rhetoric interwoven throughout.

Democracies Should Lead the way on Right to Know Day

2011-09-28T22:52:00.000-04:00

Governments are supposed to be representatives of the people, delegates of their citizens, trustees of the public good. Yet too often we see that officials, once elected or anointed, hold information close the vest and are loathe to share with the public. Information is power, and in repressive regimes, the flow of information inherently challenges the status quo. Yet in the era of digital networks and citizen media there has been a concurrent backlash by governments across the world as they seek to restrict access to information and the public's right to know.

On International Right to Know Day, this battle between secrecy and openness is being fought throughout the world, from the staunchest democracies to the most repressive regimes. In 2002, September 28 was established by access to information advocates around the world as the Right to Know Day, a day meant to raise awareness about the fundamental right to information. This right enables full citizen empowerment and participation in government and ensures against abuses of power by encouraging transparency and accountability. Freedom of information is the cornerstone not only of democracy but of all other freedoms, as the United Nations General Assembly recognized in 1946.

Read the rest of this post on Huffington Post.

Egypt reactivates Emergency Law, shuts down Al Jazeera

2011-09-15T03:28:00.002-04:00

Egypt's ruling Supreme Military Affairs Council (SCAF) have reactivated the Emergency Law prompting calls for a million man march tomorrow (Friday) to oppose the reviled law that former president Mubarak had kept in place throughout his more than two decades of power. Apparently they're most interested in putting the articles regarding spreading misinformation, arms possession and interfering with traffic back into effect (they were suspended on Jan. 25 as an attempt - albeit unsuccessful - to appease protesters).

The reactivation comes on the heels of violent protests at the Israeli embassy in downtown Cairo. One activist was quoted as saying that the military has not only targeted street activism, but that it "is going after anyone who criticizes their actions. It is like Mubarak is still in power."Just days before, on Sunday, the offices of Al Jazeera Live Egypt (Mubasher Misr) were raided under the pretenses that it did not have the proper license to operate.

Unfortunately this latest crackdown on the media is the latest in a string of violations against free expression. Authorities raided the station, confiscating its transmission equipment and detaining an engineer, even though the channel's lawyer said the station submitted the required paperwork and was given permission months ago to continue broadcasting. The station has offered 24-hour, live news coverage of Egypt since it started on March 1 (and became the first privately-owned 24-hour news channel), something I'm sure Egypt's military rulers don't appreciate since it sure they would prefer to rule without the inconvenience of transparency and accountability, especially with elections on the horizon.

Of course, Egypt'r rulers have never been huge fans of the Qatari channel (neither are most other Arab rulers!). According to the independent Al-Masry Al-Youm, the Mubarak "regime had retaliated by detaining the channel’s reporters, barring them from covering crucial events or confiscating their tapes. The channel’s editorial content had also contributed to worsening Egyptian-Qatari relations."The SCAF has arrested bloggers and activists and put them on trial before military tribunals, rather than civilian courts, much like its predecessor.

Several political parties, including the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice Party, have objected to holding the parliamentary elections, scheduled for November, while the Emergency Law is in effect. Revolutions are hard, and activists have promised once again to mobilize massive street protests in Tahrir. Will the SCAF listen? And will it let Al Jazeera's other channels cover it?

Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution

2011-09-09T22:51:00.000-04:00

Check out this trailer for Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution, a documentary about the role women played during Egypt's revolution both on the frontlines and behind the scenes.

I like the tagline "Herstory to remind History: She was there, she is there and she will always be there."

According to the project's website, it "intends to shed the light on the participation of women and to document their experiences as part of the historical memory of the Egyptian revolution" by posting video messages and testimonials in Arabic with English and Spanish subtitles. The creators hope it will be "a tool for women empowerment everywhere and a source for researchers, students and everyone interested in the matter."

Great idea. I don't know the group personally (nor is this post an endorsement, though I like the idea!), but it looks like they are nowhere close of reaching their goal of raising $28,500. As of today they've only raised $2,950.

The young women behind the uprising in Bahrain

2011-07-29T17:05:00.000-04:00

I was commissioned to write a piece about women in the Bahraini revolution for Women's eNews, an online news site that is several years old and launching an Arabic website. I pitched an article about the role of young women using digital tools and cyberactivism in their struggle for greater political rights after having met several amazing Bahraini women over the past few months: Amira al-Husseini (@justamira) of Global Voices at a cyberactivism conference in Denmark, Miriam al-Khawaja at the Oslo Freedom Forum in Norway and again in Washington when I was honored to have her over for a dinner with other digital dissidents, and Lamees Dhaif in Washington at a conference with cyberactivists from around the world hosted by NED.

"One of the things I love about the Bahraini revolution is that you have a female who became a symbol for the revolution, and it's not only the girls that look up to her, it's the men as well," Maryam told me as we chatted about the latest developments on the ground in Bahrain following the sentencing of her father and brother to extensive prison terms. "I love the fact that all my guy friends were talking about how much they look up to her and how she was like the icon of bravery to them."

But as the tagline for the story reads: Bahrain's revolution is muffled by a combination of Saudi influence and U.S. reticence. Several young women--from both inside and outside the troubled kingdom--are overcoming the forces of silence.

You can read the story Bahrain's Young Women Keep the Revolution Aloud in its entirety here.

Egypt Military Posts Facebook Poll of Presidential Candidates

2011-06-20T19:29:00.000-04:00

The Egyptian military is way more adept at using social media than Mubarak ever was. Not does the military have its own Facebook page, with more than 100,000 'friends', but it is now using Facebook to conduct a popularity poll of the 18 presidential candidates. Gotta love it.

Missing, A Gay Girl in Damascus and internet access

2011-06-06T20:27:00.001-04:00

One of Syria's most influential and groundbreaking bloggers has gone missing just days after the Syrian government shut down the internet, taking a page from Mubarak's playbook amid ongoing protests. Amina al Omari broke many barriers with her blog A Gay Girl in Damascus, a blog she used as a platform for what she described as "An out Syrian lesbian's thoughts on life, the universe and so on." According to a post today by her cousin on her blog:

Amina was seized by three men in their early 20’s. According to the witness (who does not want her identity known), the men were armed. Amina hit one of them and told the friend to go find her father.

One of the men then put his hand over Amina’s mouth and they hustled her into a red Dacia Logan with a window sticker of Basel Assad. The witness did not get the tag number. She promptly went and found Amina’s father.

The men are assumed to be members of one of the security services or the Baath Party militia. Amina’s present location is unknown and it is unclear if she is in a jail or being held elsewhere in Damascus.

Is Amina's disappearance a warning to other bloggers? Syrian authorities have clamped down on the media, forbidding foreign reporters from entering the country and targeting domestic journalists who don't tow the line. The death toll in the ongoing protests stands at more than 1,100 people, with reports that more than 10,000 people have been imprisoned since the outbreak of protests in March.

Yet Amina is not what one might call a 'typical' cyberactivist, focusing less on Politics than on the personal, though as I and others have observed elsewhere, the personal is political in the Middle East (and elsewhere, but especially in repressive societies where the public sphere is colonized by the state). She tore down barriers and destroyed stereotypes by writing about her identity as an Arab, an American, a lesbian and a faithful Sunni Muslim. As in one recent post Ana min Virginiya (I'm from Virginia) where she wrote:

I am complex, I am many things; I am an Arab, I am Syrian, I am a woman, I am queer, I am Muslim, I am binational, I am tall, I am too thin; my sect is Sunni, my clan is Omari, my tribe is Quraysh, my city is Damascus ….

And I am also a Virginian. I was born on an afternoon in a hospital in sight of where Woodrow Wilson entered the world, where streets are named for country stars … I grew up on a battlefield of the American Civil War in a town where other ancestors have lived and died for 250 years. And I learned this language in Virginia.

I live so close to her Virginian home and hope that one day we will have the opportunity to meet in person. For now, the campaign for her release by whomever has taken her has begun. A page has been started on Facebook, a letter writing campaign to congress and the State Dept. urging them to call for the US to take action is underway, and several organizations have begun to speak out.

*** UPDATE: Please note that this whole thing turned out to be a hoax by a 40-year-old American guy based on Scotland.***

Assessing the economic impact of the Egyptian uprising

2011-05-31T12:54:00.000-04:00

Published in Issue 13, Summer 2011 of Arab Media & Society

“I heard em say the revolution won't be televised; Aljazeera proved em wrong, Twitter has him paralyzed.” So begins the hip-hop song that became an anthem of the Egyptian revolution, highlighting the key role Al Jazeera played in covering the uprising and the critical importance of Twitter to activists who helped organize the protest that led to the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak after 30 years in power. Egypt’s youth movements sparked the nationwide protest, inspiring people with Facebook pages, communicating via SMS and posting blogs with pictures and video of people in the streets for all the world to see. Mubarak tried shutting down Twitter and Facebook, but that only proved he was scared of the 4 million Egyptian on Facebook. His next move took the world by surprise.

Shortly after midnight on Jan. 28 Mubarak took the radical step of shutting down the entire Internet and blocking mobile services. Weeks earlier Tunisia’s deposed president had blocked access to popular social media sites Twitter and YouTube, but nonetheless ended up fleeing to Saudi Arabia. With a population of about 80 million and a median age of 24, Egypt has nearly 4 million Facebook users, representing about 5 percent of the population. Facebook exploded in 2008 with the April 6 Youth protests and has doubled in the past year. Google, Facebook and YouTube are the three most visited sites in Egypt, and have been essential to digital activism in the region since Blogger became popular in 2005. In 2008 the April 6 strike page garnered 70,000 followers in about two weeks. In the first 24 hours the Khaled Said Facebook page had 56,000 followers. Twitter hashtags #jan25, #Egypt and #Mubarak were all worldwide trending topics for the first several days of the protests. And becoming a trending topic helps generate media attention, even as it helps organize information. The power of social media to help shape the international news agenda is one of the ways in which they subvert state authority and power.

Such a broad blackout in such an economically and politically powerful country is unprecedented, and raises significant concerns about the risk of doing business in countries where authoritarian rulers are deeply unpopular. Although Burma and Iran have attempted to do the same, Egypt’s successful blockage was a wake-up call to experts and officials who thought such a possibility was off the table.

Egypt has at least 200 ISPs according to official figures, but state-owned Egypt Telecom owns the country’s largest ISP, TE Data, which owned 70 percent of the country’s Internet capacity and had a 61 percent market share in 2010. On Jan. 27 it and the three other leading ISPs (Etisalat Misr, Link Egypt, Raya) were ordered to cut off access to the Internet and shortly after midnight they complied, casting Egypt into virtual darkness. The ISP Noor, which has a reported 8 percent market share, managed to stay online through Jan. 30 before caving. The speculation that this was because Noor serviced major international clients including Coca-Cola and ExxonMobil is well-founded. Since the government also owns the portals and pipelines that bring the Internet into Egypt and allow information to spread across the land, it was able to essentially block the Internet’s point of entry.

The government maintained the Internet blackout for five days, and the OECD estimated the cost at about $90 million, or $18 million a day, between 3 and 4 percent of the country's GDP for the period of the blackout.

Mobile phone operators were also targeted. Vodafone and France Télécom, a major shareholder in Mobinil, said the Egyptian government told them to shut off service. Their decision to comply generated enormous amounts of negative press around the world. Although they spoke out against the orders, they said they were hamstrung by national regulatory requirements. On Feb. 3 the companies were forced to send out pro-Mubarak SMS messages in a bold political commandeering of a private company that could inspire future interventions and represents a worrying intrusion into the freedom of companies to control their infrastructure, network and public perception. Vodafone also had to shut its call center in Egypt, hire 100 workers in New Zealand to handle the volume of calls, and fly 25 employees and their families out of Egypt.

The intrusion of the state into the communication networks of private, multinational corporations should raise a red flag for businesses in the rest of the region and beyond, wherever authoritarian governments and monarchies are having to contend with their own domestic uprisings.

Read the rest of this article on Arab Media & Society journal's website.
Download this article in PDF format

Mubarak & cronies fined $90 million for Internet shutdown

2011-05-30T03:48:00.000-04:00

Shortly after midnight on Jan. 28 Mubarak took the radical step of shutting down the entire internet and blocking mobile services. Now it's time for former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and other government officials to pay for the unprecedented 5-day shut down of the internet in late January. According to Al Jazeera, they have been fined more than $90 million. Mubarak will owe $34 million, former Prime Minister Ahmed Nazeef has been fined 40 million EGP, and former Interior Minister Habib al-Adly 300 million EGP (there are about 5 EGP to $1).

The government maintained the internet blackout for five days, which the OECD estimated cost about $90 million, or $18 million a day, a figure accounting for about 3-4% of Egypt’s annual GDP. The Egyptian stock market plunged 10% in one day, the biggest ever one day drop, and some ratings agencies downgraded Egypt with analysts estimating in mid-February that the economy has already lost about $3 billion due to the crisis. Such a broad blackout in such an economically and politically powerful country is unprecedented, and raises significant concerns about the risk of doing business in countries where authoritarian rulers are deeply unpopular. Although Burma and Iran attempted to do the same, Egypt’s successful blockage was a wake-up call to experts and officials who thought such a possibility was off the table.

Musings on Freedom of Expression as Beirut meeting gets underway

2011-05-29T17:33:00.000-04:00

Freedom of expression is a fundamental right that underlies the ability to exercise all other rights, and hence is one of the first targets when governments seek to crack down on their citizenry. The Arab world, of course, has long suffered from the repression of independent media and free expression, and before the uprisings got underway it once again fared the worst of any region in Freedom House's Freedom of the Press 2011 survey (full disclosure, I wrote three of the chapters). The Arab Spring (guess the pundits were too lazy to come up with a new label and had to reuse the one from 2005) was in large part driven by the innate desire of people to express themselves, especially youth who were growing up in an era of satellite TV, internet and social media and had all the tools but none of the rights.

But the fight is not over yet. Bahraini authorities apparently prevented Nabeel Rajab (@NABEELRAJAB), president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, from traveling to Beirut today to attend the conference. In Libya the journalist death toll continues to rise at 5 and counting, not to mention the arrests. The Egyptian military issued an archaic demand requiring that any content that dealt with the military pass through the 'Moral Board' while the Tunisian mainstream media continue to have much of the same staff who were put in power under Ben Ali.

The Arab Spring is on the top of the agenda for the General Meeting of the International Freedom of Expression eXchange network, or IFEX taking place over the next week in Beirut, Lebanon. Representatives of close to 100 groups devoted to free expression will converge on Beirut for a week of business and discussion about issues including impunity, journalism and new media, and host of other issues. You can track it on the IFEX blog here.

Seismic Shift: Understanding Change in the Middle East

2011-05-28T12:54:00.000-04:00

Blogs and social media in the MENA region between 2005 and the end of 2010 revealed deep-seated discontent with the political status quo. Both Egypt and Tunisia had an activist blogosphere that made political demands and called for their leaders to step down (unlike the other Arab states), but it was only in Egypt that they revealed a concerted effort to develop a movement that would revolutionize the political system. There was little indication that Tunisia would be the first successful uprising, but when Egyptians saw their neighbors oust President Ben Ali it provided the spark needed to set off the revolution that had been building, to offer hope and stamp out the fear that had kept people from taking to the streets on such a scale. And when the region saw that Egypt, the leader of the Arab world and in many ways identity, could overthrow Mubarak in a mere 18 days it sparked a regional wave of protests aimed at expelling authoritarian regimes, as in Bahrain, Libya and Yemen, or demanding massive reforms in more accommodating ones like Jordan and Morocco.

On Thursday the Stimson Center released a new report that seeks to understand what various groups in the public sphere predicted or anticipated between 2005 and 2010. I wrote the chapter on the blogosphere and social media, and participated on the panel launch Thursday with the authors of several other chapters. As Stimson notes, the "momentous events sweeping the Arab world since late 2010 raise important questions about the art and science of analyzing political and societal events. In an age of information surplus, which creates the illusion that one can easily know what is happening anywhere in the world, big surprises still occur. Societies change, governments make choices that have consequences, and the political life of a country or a region is transformed."

And indeed the Tunisian, and to a lesser extent the Egyptian, uprisings were a surprise to most people across the Western world and arguably beyond. Given its scope and short time period for the preparation of this report, the vast majority of the data analyzed was only in English (the main exceptions were the April 6 blog and Facebook page, and the We are all Khaled Said Facebook page)

As the editors note, "the upheaval in the Middle East lends itself to reflections about how regional experts with deep knowledge of the Middle East and those who use distinct political science or other methodologies to understand processes of change, fared in their assessments of the likelihood of change.

In early 2011, the Stimson Center invited a group of experts, who represented distinct non-governmental institutional perspectives to look back on the work of these sectors and evaluate how they looked at prospects for change in the Middle East. The sectors included:

The full report Seismic Shift: Understanding Change in the Middle East can be downloaded in full or by chapter.

Cyber Activism Changing the World? Bloggers convene in Denmark to discuss

2011-05-11T12:43:00.000-04:00

I was honored to take part in a conference Cyber Activism Changing the World? organized by several Danish freedom of expression groups on the topic of cyberactivism in the Arab world and the role of women in the uprisings. Many of the most influential and prolific blogger cyber activists from the region were in attendance, both as speakers and in the audience, as this initiative is a continuation part of a broader one that began two years ago and has included meetings in Cairo and Amman previously.

I think everyone pretty much agreed that the role of social media was important and helpful in the revolutionary uprisings, but it certainly did not cause them nor can they be credited as any more than tools. It was the courage of individuals, many of whom had never used Facebook, Twitter or even the Internet. Yet there is also a recognition that now everyone knows about these tools, at least the names, even if they’ve never used them. Digital activism was instrumental in organizing and mobilizing people, but so was individual, person-to-person communication independent of modern technology. For example, in Egypt, when Mubarak cut off the internet he effectively forced people to the street – a major tactical mistake in Mona’s perspective. By shutting down the internet activists could no longer tweet or SMS each other to see what was going on so they had to actually go into the streets to find out.

Parents could not keep tabs on their kids out in the protests because the mobile phones were out so they had to go to the streets themselves. And youth who hadn’t thought of joining the uprising found they had nothing else to do once the internet and mobile phone networks were shuttered so they figured they might as well join in. So in fact in the desperate attempt to cut off internet access prompted more and more people to join their fellow citizens in the street.

I spoke just before Mona el-Tahaway (@monaeltahaway), whose talk focused specifically on women in Saudi, Riverbend in Iraq, lesbians online in Lebanon and A Gay Girl in Damascus. Fatima @arabicca from Tuninisia spoke about her concerns for the integrity and continuation of the Tunisian revolution, especially in light of police violence that broke out that very day. Amira al-Huseini, @JustAmira is Global Voices editor and a Bahraini with 9 cats, who spoke about the role that the activist aggregator has played in these “Arab Spring” revolutions and other key moments like the April 6, 2008 strike.

Tweets from Tahrir and the Daily Show

2011-04-26T00:07:00.000-04:00

An Egyptian activist who was in Tahrir Square on Jan. 25 was Jon Stewart's featured guest on the Daily Show tonight. According the her bio on the show's site, "Gigi Ibrahim is a journalist and socialist activist who was one of the leaders of the takeover of Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution in 2011." It goes on to note that she used social media to become a citizen journalist and that these tools were important for coordination of the protests, "it was the battles on the streets that were crucial, it was their power that made the revolution." But unlike the usual cadre of Egyptian cyberactivists who have paraded through the media and think tanks of Washington, Gigi said she learned about the opposition movement from a class at her university. She said she didn't know there was such a broad opposition movement in Egypt until she heard about it from Hossam el-Hamalaway, one of the leading cyberactivists in Egypt who has long supported the labor movement and brought the tools of the 21st century to their struggle. I highly recommend his blog Arabawy if you want to keep up with leftist politics and labor movement dynamics in Egypt.

There is also a new book out called Tweets from Tahrir that collects observations from about 50 Twitterers to "give differing perspectives on the same event, creating almost a kind of cubist painting—seeing the same thing from different angles,” according the New Yorker review. I haven't read it, but sure am glad somebody was capturing the instantaneous version of history (too awkward of a word play on the first version of history usually attributed to journalists?!). Although reports that only about 40,000 people in the Arab world were on Twitter at that time, about half of whom were in Egypt, their extensive use of Twitter over the 18 days of the uprising (not to mention before and after) means those little 140 character tweets offer a unique insight into what was happening and how on the ground.

Furthermore, Egyptians were really the vanguard of using Twitter for political activism. As far back as 2007 cyberactivists were using the microblog with their mobile phones to organize protests and communicate with each other about political activism. The James Buck incident, where the US Berkeley grad student tweeted 'arrested' to his followers on Twitter, which included many leading cyberactivists, alerting the public to his detention and setting off a global campaign was one of the first internationally resonant examples of this. More to come in the diss.

U.S.-Islamic World Forum underway in Washington

2011-04-14T10:55:00.000-04:00

For the first time in its eight-year history the US-Islamic Forum is taking place in Washington, with representatives of more than 30 Muslim-majorty countries in attendance. The forums are hosted by Brookings and Qatar each year, according to the invitation, which I received "[a]s one of a select group of bloggers who cover the Middle East and Muslim world issues." It goes on to note that "the Forum has built a unique network of relationships between leading policy and opinion leaders in the United States and the Muslim world, and has developed a reputation as both the premier convening body for American and Muslim world leaders and a catalyst for positive action."

And indeed world leaders are in attendance, including Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, Secretary-General of the Organization of Islamic Congress, which represents 57-member countries at the UN, Madeleine Albright, Former U.S. Secretary of State, Tunisia's Minister of Finance Jaloul Ayed, and a host of civil society leaders, though Egypt was quite over-represented with democracy activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, publisher Hisham Kassem, Founder and Director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) Hossam Bahgat, and former ambassador Nabil Fahmy.

Clinton sought to dispel the 'exceptionalist' myth - that Arabs or Muslims (too often the media and other elide the two) are inherently incapable of, uninterested in or fundamentally ill-disposed towards democracy. She said the recent uprisings have "exposed myths that for too long were used to justify a stagnant status quo," the most "pernicious" of which was "that Arabs do not share universal human aspirations for freedom, dignity and opportunity." She also raised the issue of women and minorities in the region, harkening back to the Arab Development Report and seeking again to dispel the myth that repressive and retrograde family laws or personal status laws that limit women's rights are somehow Islamic, pointing to Muslim majority countries like Indonesia and Bangladesh.

The Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) was also represented, by Secretary General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the Turkish reformist who is the first SG elected by secret vote and has made reforming the OIC to be more legitimate and relevant the goal of his five-year term. He called for the Obama administration to take "concrete steps" to follow through on his rhetorical pledges to improve relations with the Muslim world. "There are certain concerns and grievances when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict and other issues," he said, noting that if they were not adressed properly there will be "problems between the US and Muslim World."

He also raised the problems faced by Muslims in the West and noted that the growing anti Islamic feeling in the West is a contemporary manifestation of racism and must be addressed in that context, adding that Muslims have been subjected to various forms of scrutiny, suspicion and negative stereotyping in the entire Western world.

You can watch the forum on Livestream and read more about the following working groups:

Egyptian blogger sentenced by military rulers amid accusations of human rights "cronyism"

2011-04-13T22:27:00.001-04:00

Blogger Maikel Nabil was sentenced to two years in prison today, a one year reduction from his three-year sentence handed down on April 11 by a military tribunal in closed session. Nabil was tried by a military tribunal, despite being a civilian, joining the 12,000 people who have been convicted in such trials since the fall of Mubarak. He was convicted of insulting the army and publishing false news, which is of course ridiculous given the military are currently the political rulers of the transitional country and thus must be susceptible to criticism! Nabil founded the Facebook group No for Compulsory Military Service and has been arrested several times, yet continued to publish by sending hand written notes from prison to his lawyers to post on his blog. He has also been on a hunger strike for more than 114 days, and his brother said Nabil will fast until "dead or released."

Of course Egyptian cyberactivists and citizen journalists are in an uproar, refusing to give up their right to free speech, which they so valiantly fought for, despite the SCAF's threats to take away these rights. Human rights organizations defending Nabil and advocating for his release alleged that his lawyers were tricked, and others cautioned about the dangerous precedent being set. The US also called for his release today, although for some reason the US continues to provide unconditional aid to the military SCAF leaders even though they are consistently violating the fundamental rights of their citizens. And this in a year of budget cuts and economic hardships in America!

Nabili's Mainstream Egyptian media initially ignored his plight, but as this post written by blogger and friend Tarek Amr details, cyberactivists and citizen journalists pressed for the media coverage it deserved. As Rasha Abdullah, an AUC professor and author of a book on the internet in the Arab world, tweeted: @rashaabdulla: #MaikelNabil's case is clear message to #Internetactivists. We have to defend #freedom of expression. This is not acceptable. #Egypt #Jan25.

Yet Egypt's cyberactivst community has also come under criticism for failing to galvanize opposition around his case as they have around the arrest and imprisonment of one of the grandfathers of Egyptian cyberactivism, Alaa Abdel Fattah, leading to accusations of "human rights cronyism." According to journalist Joseph Mayton, fewer than 20 people turned out for Nabil's court sessions yet organizers of the #NoMilTrials campaign for Alaa organized a massive march in late October throughout downtown Cairo to put pressure on the military to release him. (Alaa has refused to speak at his trial before a military court that he and many others see as illegitimate and thus unable to compel him to take part, but continues to blog from prison.) Mayton says "[t]he reason could boil down to simple cronyism, but I suspect it is even more intricate than this. Nabil has controversial, and unpopular, ideas on normalization with Israel. As a Coptic Christian, this has been scorned by activists in the country, who have an ardent anti-Israeli sentiment– and justifiably so."

I disagree with Mayton's argument, however, that human rights groups should not concentrate on highlighting specific cases rather than broader human rights abuses - this is a technique for making people care about those who are usually very far removed from them and their daily lives. The same technique is used by journalists, who find that person or anecdote that illustrates a broader trend or issue. He also blames this "cronyism" in part on access, which may be somewhat true but doesn't explain the true dynamics, which are far more complex in that they are related to the nature of networks and cyberactivism as it developed in Egypt. The power laws of networks mean that highly connected activists like Alaa, who was one of Egypt's first bloggers, is one of the most highly connected nodes in the Egyptian cybersphere and highly connected to international journalists, rights groups and transnational activist networks. He has more than 71,000 followers on Twitter and has posted more than 112,000 tweets, one of the most connected people in Egypt's cybersphere.

Mayton continues: "Fattah is friends with the human rights institutions and journalists who report what goes on in Egypt. So, of course he has the upper hand in what is reported and what is advocated. Also, the rights workers understand that he is an international symbol that will galvanise foreign press to intervene and write an article on the situation. It’s all PR."

If not for the last snarky comment I would agree; but why does that deserve condemnation? NGOs, journalists and activists have limited resources in terms of time and money, and the public has a limited attention span and are drowning in information. I have similarly written before about the unequal coverage given to highly connected cyberactivists in the post Meditations on journalism, cyberactivism and my research and my PhD dissertation. Alaa spent years building up a transitional cyberactivist network that includes many of Egypt's most prominent activists, but they have not been silent on Nabil and neither have international groups. Which means that as we advocate for the US to put its money where its mouth is with respect to the SCAF, and for the military to respect freedom of expression and opinion, it will benefit each and every person not just those who become poster kids.

For more about Nabil and his perspective on the military's role in post-revolution Egypt, check out this interview he did before his arrest.

Cyberactivism and the Arab Revolt: Battles Waged Online and Lessons Learned

2011-04-04T07:35:00.001-04:00

Adel Iskandar and I spoke on a panel at the Middle East Institute last week. In case you missed it, you can listen to the podcast of Cyberactivism and the Arab Revolt: Battles Waged Online and Lessons Learned or watch it on YouTube, though I've posted the first bit below.

The second part of my talk:

The rest of the videos, including Q & A, can be seen on the Middle East Institute's YouTube channel.

The Revolutions will be Hashtagged: Twitter Turns 5 as the Middle East Demands Democracy

2011-03-29T22:20:00.000-04:00

By Courtney C. Radsch

Twitter, the microblog people love to hate, turned 5 this week. Twitter is probably most famous for the celebrities and politicians that use it to communicate with their fan bases, but in the Middle East Twitter is better known as a tool of political dissent and social mobilization. Deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak blocked Twitter before cutting off access to the internet entirely for five days.

Although Twitter has been around since 2006, it really did not start gaining popularity in the Middle East until 2008, when tech savvy youth and cyber activists started using the service for political activism. These early adopters tweeted mainly in English, not Arabic, were largely male (twice as many men as women tweeted in mid-2009), and interacted primarily with bloggers, with more than 80% using Twitter to find news and stay updated, according to March 2009 estimates. The same survey indicated there were only about 3,000 Twitter users in the Middle East, with that number growing to more than 40,000 by mid-2010...

From the beginning, Twitter has been one of the most important tools in Egypt's cyber activists' repertoire, useful for amplifying their messages, framing their grievances and demands, and organizing social protest. Twitter was a critical platform for Tunisian activists in the youth movement that helped oust president Ben Ali after 23 years in power. In the months leading up to the January protests, activists sent warnings via Twitter about government phishing attempts to obtain passwords for email and Facebook accounts. When bloggers Slim Amamou and Azyz Amamy were arrested their friends found out nearly simultaneously via Twitter, and because Amamou used his mobile phone to text Google Latitude with his location - an interior ministry building in Tunis - they immediately knew where he was being held. The Tunisian government was one of the most sophisticated internet censors in the world, and it had shut down several popular social networking sites.

Read the full article on Huffington Post.

Speaking on panel today at Middle East Institute

2011-03-28T10:07:00.000-04:00

The Middle East Institute Presents

Cyberactivism and the Arab Revolt:
Battles Waged Online and Lessons Learned

Featuring:

Adel Iskandar

Georgetown University,Center for Contemporary Arab Studies

Courtney Radsch

Senior Program Officer, Freedom House

Monday, March 28, 2011

12:00-1:15pm

The Middle East Institute
1761 N Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036

The Middle East Institute is proud to host digital media experts Adel Iskandar and Courtney Radsch for a discussion on the nature of the cyberactivism that is fueling the uprisings spreading throughout the Middle East. Iskandar will examine the battle in Egypt between the government and the protesters to control online discourse, analyzing the obstacles and the successes. Radsch will look ahead to some of the online struggles in other Arab nations, examining how governments in countries like Saudi Arabia are working to control online mobilization and activism and what lessons can be drawn from Egypt. She will also examine the response of cyberactivists to the crackdowns, as well as explore the role of the U.S. and the international community in supporting cyberactivism in the Middle East.

To RSVP for this event, please click here.

My favorite music of the revolutions

2011-03-27T23:08:00.000-04:00

So my favorite song of the revolution is "#jan25" by Omar Offendum, which I already posted, you can watch it here. But several others have come out over the past few months, both since and in the leadup to the revolutions, especially in Tunisia.

The site Mideastunes has an extensive directory of socially conscious music produced by Middle East hip-hop artists, rappers, songwriters and others. The NewStatesman has a list of top 20 political songs, though unsurprisingly they are all American, with a couple British ones thrown in for good measure.

The Ghaddafi Zenga Zenga video is also hard to beat, especially with the addition of lap dancers!

Bahrain Unite is a sweet rap song by several Bahraini artists, including DJ Outlaw, The Mystro, Flipperachi, and May Alqasim that celebrates unity and love of Bahrain and all Bahrainis, a response to the sectarian nature many ascribe to the current unrest.

A Tunisian rapper whose YouTube handle is MrFederalistetunisie posted a rap song called Anti Ben Ali 2014 in September calling on Ben Ali to rid the country of corruption that has nearly 260,000 views (note: there is no video, but the song's Arabic lyrics coupled with the repetitive piano riffs and catchy beat has made it one of the most popular videos to come out in the leadup to the revolution).

This Tunisian rapper, alhiwarnet, posted this music video رايس لبلاد ... اغنية راب تونسية (President of the country... A Tunisian Rap Song) in November 2010, prior to the revolution. Based on my somewhat cursory review of Arab rappers' YouTube videos, it looks like Tunisian's were making the most use of this free distribution platform.

Here's another good one. “President, Your People are Dying" by Hamada Ben-Amor

The Chant Heard Round the World الشعب! يريد! إسقاط النظام

2011-03-27T16:36:00.001-04:00

!الشعب! يريد! إسقاط النظام
alsha3b! yureed! isqaat alnitham!
the people want the toppling of the regime.

This is the chant heard round the world. Egyptians shouted it from the middle of Tharir Square to the capitals of Europe. Yemen's president reportedly told Al Arabiya yesterday he was ready to step down, but today the Saudi-owned channel reports of that Saleh is blaming the Muslim Brotherhood for being behind the current unrest and attempting a coup. The crisis continues even as protesters demand his immediate resignation.

In Bahrain the sentiment continues to be expressed even amid the Saudi troops sent in at the behest of the monarchy. Bahrainis supporting the thought expressed in the chant while on scholarships in the US, however, have been harshly punished as the protests continue amid Saudi military assistance and virtual silence by the Obama administration.

The UAE's government mouthpiece Gulf News reported Saturday that Bahrain's education ministry had canceled the scholarships of 40 students "for taking part in rallies calling for the overthrow of the regime" because they "were granted with the stipulation that the students behave in a satisfactory manner and commit themselves to not harming the reputation of Bahrain in any way."

Oh and the Twitter Density in Manama today - about 45%.

When will governments realize that the era of controlling their images is over? Especially in countries where freedom of expression is constrained by the state and media outlets belong to the political and economic elite. The emergence and increasing popularity of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and the continued use of blogs, YouTube and Flikr comes as a small surprise. The ultimate publishing tool, internet platforms have enabled average people to practice freedom of expression whenever and wherever they feel like it, while empowering activists, magnifying their message and organizational capacity, and allowing anyone at anytime to be an activist.

And enabling their calls for change to be heard round the world.

Satellite operators censor Nasrallah's speech by cutting signals

2011-03-20T21:42:00.002-04:00

Lebanese hoping to watch Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah deliver a much-anticipated speech this weekend were disappointed when all they saw were blank screens notifying satellite subscribers of the signal interruption. Al Jadid (New TV) for example, showed a blue screen that disappeared as soon as the speech was over and cut back into regular programming.

Apparently Arabsat and the Egyptian-owned Nilesat jammed the signals of all the stations they thought would carry the speech live, though people managed to get around this censorial blackout by posting videos of the speech on YouTube and live Tweeting it.

In the speech he commended the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, noting that wide unpopularity and discontent with the ruling regimes coupled with the neutrality of the army were essential to their success. He also condemned the response to Bahrain's revolt, which has been violent and involved sending Saudi troops into the country. He also spoke about Wikileaks and a host of other issues as he is known to go on for quite awhile when he addresses the public.

Unlike other speeches he has given, this one got relatively limited coverage in the Arabic press, which some may be inclined to attribute to the fact that he is a Shiite leader and the major satellite stations (Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, MBC, Egyptian TV etc.) are foreign policy arms of Sunni-led countries. Others may consider that with all else going on this weekend, such as the continuing fallout from the Tsunami and nuclear disasters in Japan, that he simply was not competitive in the news cycle. But given that the Sunni-dominated Arab League owns Arabsat and Egypt owns Nilesat, and both aggressively jammed the signal, it appears that the first possibility is the more likely. The implications of government's censoring Nasrallah's speech could have serious implications for more broadly censoring speeches by unpopular or opposition leaders. It also underscores that despite our interconnected world and the pervasiveness of communication tools, most media depend on a limited amount of hardware points, such as satellites or underwater fiber optic cables that deliver the internet through key nodes into a country, and are therefor susceptible to government pressure and interference.

Coalition of the Youth of the Revolution snub Clinton in Egypt: Who are they?

2011-03-16T23:14:00.005-04:00

Members of the Coalition of the Youth of the Revolution (which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like) snubbed US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she toured Tahrir Square, refusing her invitation to meet with her because of "the US administration's weak position at the start of the revolution due to its close relationship with the ousted president." The coalition of members of the youth movement that helped oust President Hosni Mubarak after 30 years in power were referring to the perceived slow response of the Obama administration to condemn Mubarak's crackdown on protesters. The US was, and I suppose it until Congress finishes the budget, one of Egypt's biggest supporters, providing $1.3 million of military support each year while allowing the Egyptian government the right to nix US funding to NGO's it didn't approve of. (Hillary also announced today she would not serve a second term).

I wonder that Al Destor failed to mention the snub, relying instead on a Reuters story rather than its own reporting. I typically watch ABC Nightly News and Diane didn't mention it either. Perhaps it was blown up, but I think it's also telling. So who is in this coalition? And what are they doing about the future of their country?

The The coalition has made a set of demands, which it posted on its Facebook page and listed at a press conference that it taped and posted on its YouTube channel. Interestingly, posts to articles about developments on the ground link to English-language sources, primarily elite Western sources as well the English-language versions of domestic papers like Al Masry al Youm and Al Destor. The Facebook group, for example, is in English, the video is in Arabic. There are very savvy organizers and mobilizers among the youth movement, and they know that getting the world media on their side, and communicating to Washington and other world capitals, mean their demands need to be understood to be reported.

The coalition includes representatives of several groups, including the April 6 Youth and Muslim Brotherhood, which are among the more seasoned groups among them. They are:
Young Muslim Brotherhood
Youth Movement for Justice and Freedom
April 6 Youth Movement
Young People's campaign to support ElBaradei
Youth of the National Assembly to change
Youth Party of dignity
Party Youth Delegation
Youth Party tomorrow
Youth Rally
Independent youth
Bloggers and activists

The Wikipedia page on the group also lists the following members:
We are all Khalid Said
Asmaa Mahfouz
Ahmed Maher
Wael Ghonim

The state-owned newspaper Al Ahram listed specific members in an article on Feb. 9, noting that "the coalition only aims to articulate its demands and keep them at the forefront of public consciousness as Egypt prepares for change." Because of the semi-private nature of Facebook and in order to ensure a record of these demands when made, I've taken the liberty of pasting the English version below:

The revolution of January 25 has canceled the social contract between the people and his regime that was toppled, and now we are in front of the design and shaping a new social contract commensurate with the transition and their needs to achieve all the gains of the revolution and implement the popular will.

Based on this, confirm that a higher state of legitimacy arose from the revolution of January 25 and no longer 71 Constitution

This legitimacy has been achieved on February 11 for President renunciation and transfer of authority of the Supreme Council of the armed forces and not to the President of the People's Assembly, which implies the solution of this Council and the abolition of the Constitution is old .. This is confirmed by the

A statement by the armed forces last

Also that the power exercised by the President in the appointment of his deputies fell by parting with them is no longer there any legitimacy to his deputy, stepped down as president means precludes his deputy (the base section follows the original).

Based on all of the above we have a new legitimacy requires managing the affairs of the country's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces of the road and follow-up supervision and control .. Any

. Ensuring that the demands of the revolution

. Protection project to achieve the revolutionary demands of any deviation

. Determine the time period of 6 months and not more than 9 months to achieve a maximum demands

Based upon .. Believe that the issue of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces ad interim constitution in the time duration board regulates the transition should include the following: -

1 - Cancel the old constitution and a new constitution for the country following the formation of the new parliament should be the nature of the popular and democratic constitution paves the way for a parliamentary republic, including include reducing the powers of the President of the Republic and the separation of powers and specific rules for the electoral process.

2 - state of emergency and cancellation of special courts and martial law

3 - re-formation of a transitional government of technocrats headed by a civilian national figure is compatible, and who has the confidence and credibility with the public in a maximum month. Lowering the age to run for parliamentary elections for 25 years, and presidential elections for 35 years

4 - the launch of the right to form associations and trade unions and the issuance of the establishment of newspapers and other media with no restrictions other than the notification to a competent judicial authority

5 - the holding of trade unions and student unions, according to the law of each of them

6 - the release of all political prisoners before and after Jan. 25.

7 - to resolve the ruling National Party and hand over all its assets and its headquarters to the state.

8 - abolition of the Egyptian State Security, and the abolition of directing recruits to the central security sector.

9 - the implementation of all final judgments issued in the previous period, such as .. The expulsion of the university guards - and stop the export of gas - and the abolition of Law 100 governing the trade union elections ....

10 - repeal of the parties within ten days, and the development of a new law for the exercise of political rights within a month.

11 - to resolve all the local councils also confirm that local authorities take the hardware multiply and become a real authority in their respective fields.

11 - Who participates in the position in the transitional phase may not run in the first parliamentary elections or presidential leaders.

This stress on securing the transition from any external pressure to secure the transfer of power.

Finally ... We emphasize that we will have a dialogue a community alive with a number of groups, partisan and non-partisan, public figures and political groups and community effectiveness in addition to the transitional government and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces on the paper so that we can get out all in a democratic political road map for this transition period leading up to the development of Egypt in the position they deserve.

We also reaffirm our appreciation of the armed forces and the implementation of the popular will and aspirations, and he began to take significant steps toward achieving the goals of the revolution Qaibde Accounting corrupt and criminals, and good resolution of both houses is slated to remain.

But in case you want to see them in action (and get a great chance to practice your Arabic listening skills!) here is the press conference for your viewing pleasure:

Panel on Mobile Action: New Trends in Advocacy

2011-03-08T23:17:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow I'm taking part in a panel at NYU's Heyman Center for Philanthropy and Fundraising entitled 'Mobile Action: New Trends in Advocacy'.

According to the event website: The use of social media by youth in the Middle East has prompted a new look at the power of mobile technology in advocacy. This Wednesday, March 9th, a panel of mobile advocacy experts will explore new uses of the mobile Internet, smart phones and new mobile technologies by nonprofits, NGOs and upstart social innovators in cause advocacy -- from Cairo to Chicago to Haiti, as well as places in-between.

The confirmed panelists are:

Andrew Zolli, curator of the vaunted Pop!Tech conferences and Founder, Z + Partners; Christopher Fabian, Co-Lead, UNICEF's Tech4Dev Unit; Nadim Mahmud, co-founder of Medic Mobile; Courtney Radsch, Senior Program Officer, Global Freedom of Expression Project at Freedom House; Jon Gosier of Ushahidi, and Liz Ngonzi, a mobile tech consultant and a fundraising instructor at the .

This was the first I had heard of the center, but apparently if the website is to be believe, it is "the nation’s preeminent educator of fundraisers and grantmakers," and offers a Masters in fundraising. I wonder if there is a theoretical literature in this program? What are frameworks of analysis? Or is it all practical and skills based? Interested to learn more. You can follow the center at @CauseGlobal.

PBS FRONTLINE: Revolution in Cairo

2011-02-28T07:04:00.003-05:00

Here is the link to the full episode of PBS FRONTLINE's documentary Revolution in Cairo.

Although only a couple clips of the hour-and-a-half interview made it in, you can read a full transcript here (thanks PBS!). There's also a good written summary of how the April 6 Movement got started here, including a video done by an Australian channel in 2008 when the movement first got started.

(Please note that PBS does not allow embedding of its videos, so the video below is a link to the 2008 documentary)

"Revolution in Cairo" airs tonight on FRONTLINE

2011-02-22T16:47:00.003-05:00

FRONTLINE dispatches teams to Cairo, going inside the youth movement that helped light the fire on the streets and featuring what I imagine will turn out to be a relatively short interview with me about why it succeeded. It follows the "April 6th" group, which two years ago began making a bold use of the Internet for their underground resistance-tactics that led to jail and torture for many of their leaders. Now, starting with the "Day of Rage," we witness those same leaders plot strategy and head into "Liberation Square" to try to bring down President Mubarak. Also in this hour, veteran Middle East correspondent Charles Sennott of GlobalPost lands in Cairo for FRONTLINE to take a hard look at Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood-the most well-organized and powerful of the country's opposition groups-as a new fight for power in Egypt begins to takes shape.

Revolution in Cairo leads the segment, and will give an inside look at the younger generation who helped start the revolution in Egypt. In the second part of the hour, RAINMedia, Martin Smith, and correspondent Charlie Sennott report on Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.

Watch the program Tuesday, February 22nd, at 9 PM on PBS (check local listings).

A double-edged sword

2011-02-15T08:55:00.000-05:00

(Originally published in ORGZine on Feb. 15)

Digital activism has become a potent and politically charged manifestation of power - but activists aren't the only ones with access to Facebook

In authoritarian regimes the spread of information is a subversive act. Throughout the Middle East, states control vast swaths of the media, usually including all terrestrial television stations, major newspapers and radio. Before the internet enabled self-publishing and dissemination, there was really no mass media through which youth and minority groups could get their message out. But through politically entrepreneurial uses of digital and social media, young Egyptians—including the April 6 Movement—and other cyberactivists helped bring down President Hosni Mubarak after 30 years in power.

Coverage of the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia have largely focused on the role of social media, both in western media and on Al Jazeera English. Pithy, reductionist labels like “Wiki Revolution” and “Twitter Revolution” attribute to technology what is, in fact, the reaction to broad disenfranchisement and economic despair, along with disgust over presidential corruption

Nonetheless, social media coupled with internet and mobile technology has proved to be a powerful challenge to the political status quo. Over the past month, activists in Tunisia and Egypt used these tools to successfully challenge the reign of authoritarian presidents whose decades in power had left little room for political participation and whose economic policies failed to provide for the needs of their people.

Throughout the MENA region (Middle East & North Africa), mass protests are organised via social media, including in Bahrain, Yemen, and Morocco. But when such efforts are not linked into the broader activist community or public they are bound to fail, like a Facebook protest for Syria that fizzled because it was inauthentic. China tried to block information about Egypt from its citizens by filtering out internet content about the uprisings, but with the fall of two regimes in less than a month this is a losing battle. Tunisia inspired Egyptians, and Egypt will inspire the world.
Tweet a revolution
While Egyptian authorities targeted professional journalists, citizen journalists, activists and the human rights and legal aid organisations that have helped protect and defend rights, social media became a powerful tool in the hands of those challenging the status quo. While it isn't a panacea to the political, economic and social problems plaguing the region, it certainly helps organising, mobilising, communicating and putting domestic issues on the international agenda.

Activists who helped propel the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia used social media—especially Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flikr—and digital tools as an integral part of their mobilisation strategies and as key communication forums. They circumvented censorship tools, attempts by Ben Ali and Mubarak to block Twitter, and even the entire shutdown of the internet in Egypt. Ensuring information continued to get out became an act of protest and agitation, and social media were essential tools for doing do.

With a population of about 80 million and a median age of 24, Egypt has nearly four million Facebook users, representing about 5% of the population. Facebook exploded in 2008 with the April 6 Youth protests and has doubled in the past year. Google, Facebook and YouTube are the three most visited sites in Egypt, and have been essential to digital activism in the region since Blogger became popular in 2005.

In 2008, the April 6 strike page garnered 70,000 followers in about 2 weeks. In the first 24 hours the Khaled Said Facebook page had 56,000 followers. Twitter hashtags #jan25, #Egypt and #Mubarak were all worldwide trending topics for the first several days of the protests. Becoming a trending topic helps generate media attention, even as it helps organise information. The power of social media to help shape the international news agenda is one of the ways in which they subvert state authority and power.

Excuse me, please

Capturing the attention of Western media is a key strategic goal for activists, who largely believe that western media attention offers some veneer of protection to them – though it can also highlight potential dissidents to the government. Sandmonkey wrote of April 6 strike in 2008, when the movement first emerged:

“If this spreads, then the regime will spare no expense to squash it, especially with the visible absence of the western media and their coverage. Without international cover, this won't survive, and the government will fucking air bomb the demonstrators if they truly became a threat to the regime.”

The same applies to the protests that rocked Egypt from 25 January until 11 February, when Mubarak’s resignation was finally announced. Mainstream media covered the Egyptian unrest far more quickly and pervasively than they did with Tunisia – although Al Jazeera far surpassed US and UK news media in the quality of coverage. Their correspondents got outside the capital, interviewed a broader swath of Egyptians and did a far better job of putting things in context, being less prone to attribute the uprisings to American-made technologies.

Most major broadcast media devoted round-the-clock coverage to the protests in Egypt whereas they woefully disregarded Tunisia until just before Ben Ali’s departure. In both cases, however, the social media angle was a lead story and figured prominently in statements by the White House.

Don't look now, but...

But social media is also a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it provides important tools for circumventing government dominance of the media sector and restrictive freedom of association laws that prohibit NGOs from operating or groups from gathering, thus helping to shift the balance of power away from authoritarian governments. But this media also facilitates state surveillance because of its public nature and most people’s lack of familiarity with basic security settings on their social profiles, much less digital encryption or counter-censorship tools.

For example, most Egyptians do not protect their Facebook profiles by restricting access to friends or networks only, meaning that those who joined the Khaled Said fan page that we now know was created by Google executive Wael Ghonim or anti-Mubarak pages (of which there are plenty) are very likely to be known to the regime. Egyptian Facebook users also tend to use the semi-private platform to make friends rather than to stay in touch with existing ones, as is more typical in the US, for example. The lack of high privacy settings coupled with the extensiveness of networks among Egyptian activists means that it is relatively easy for the government to track developments and planning on Facebook.

Twitter is similarly open and is also extremely popular among digital activists, who link it to their blogs and Facebook pages and are followed by journalists. I don’t know of digital activsits who restrict Tweets to only their followers – this defeats the point of such services in any case. The use of Arabic and English by many of the more savvy activists is one example of the concerted effort to ensure the western world is getting their information. Hence it is little surprise that Mubarak blocked Twitter before deciding to close off access to the internet for the entire country.

Tunisian authorities used phishing to access email accounts of activists and follow their activities in the year leading up to ouster of Ben Ali. In Sudan, authorities used faux protests publicised on social media to entrap activists and arrest them. Over the past several months, Blackberry-maker RIM caved to demands by the UAE, followed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, India and others to make its encrypted data streams accessible to host governments. The UAE’s request came just days after youth attempted to organise a peaceful protest against rising oil prices using BB Messenger. And Egypt’s Internet shutdown also meant the government could not surveil and track digital activists

Gaining the upper hand

For the moment the scales are tipped in favor of activists because publicity and popularity provides a level of protection to many of the more outspoken and well-know digital activists, although it didn’t prevent authorities from raiding the offices of key rights groups like the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information and the Hisham Mubark Law Centre – both central resources for Egypt’s young digital activists.

Although their popularity puts them on the authorities’ radar, it also means that when these well-connected, highly-followed youth are arrested or prosecuted it activates transnational activist networks. Thus international human rights and journalist organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Freedom House, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Reporters Sans Frontières have mobilized their resources to advocate for their release and draw attention to the abuses by security forces.

Countries like Egypt, Tunisia and the highly authoritarian but very wealthy Gulf states represent tantalising markets and the fact is, without access to technology, these countries would be unable to compete in the globalised world. Companies like Research in Motion should take a stand for the rights and values of the countries in which it started and grew. Without the benefits provided by the political and legal environments of Canada, it would never have been able to start up or grow into the innovative powerhouse it has become.
At least US companies like Google and Twitter have come out of the side of freedom by providing workarounds to enable people in Egypt to use social media and evade censorship even when internet and mobile services were cut, including providing international landline numbers for internet access, ‘speak2tweet’ enabling Twitter posting via voicemail, and cloud servers. These solutions were publicised by people around the world through social media and experienced digital activists, like Manal and Alaa, who posted detailed instructions on how to circumvent the near total censorial blackout on their blogs.

The digital blackout was a powerful reminder of the power of older technologies, and innovative solutions emerged to merge the best of both. Landlines continued to be available, people in Egypt were encouraged to leave their wireless connections unlocked, wireless internet relays to neighboring countries were created by stringing together access points. And while social media was important, it was the fact that protests and popular support transcended the digital forums that makes these recent uprisings monumental.

The 'Inside Story' of social media's role in Egypt on Al Jazeera

2011-02-10T11:53:00.000-05:00

Jillian York, Mohammed al-Abdallah and I were on Al Jazeera's Inside Story to discuss whether social media can really be credited with sparking the recent uprisings across the Middle East.

When I showed up for the interview at Al Jazeera's office in Washington I got a call from a producer in Doha telling me that Jillian was representing the 'skeptic' and Mohammed was the 'neutral' one. So I'm supposed to be the evangelist?! Well, as you'll see, we were all pretty much on the same page.

If you haven't seen the #jan25 video by Omar Offendum and his colleagues you've got to check it out here.

Egypt's Missing Google Youth Activist Released

2011-02-07T23:22:00.000-05:00

Wael Ghonim, the digital activist and Google executive who was abducted off the streets two weeks ago gave an emotional interview tonight to Dream 2 TV's Mona el-Shezly on the day he was released from prison where he had been held for weeks in secrecy. The 6th of April movement nominated him as their symbolic spokesperson, demanding that Mubarak's government talk to him if it wanted to talk to them. And it appears it did indeed talk to him; in the interview Ghonim describes how the secret police who kept him incommunicado spoke with him as an "equal" on the same level as themselves.

He was abducted on Jan. 27, prompting a global search via Twitter that garnered attention in the elite media. People around the world re-tweeted appeals for his release while friends combed the streets of Cairo looking for him. @Ghonim tweeted: When you don't see anything but a black scene for 12 days you keep praying that those outside still remember you. Thanks everyone #Jan25."

He described how he was grabbed, taken to internal security, and interrogated, but said he was not tortured. Yet he refused to make the interview about him, emotionally recognizing the sacrifices of his fellow citizens.

"I am not a hero. I only used the keyboard; the real heroes are the ones on the ground. Those I can't name. This is the season where people use the word traitor against each other. I wasn't abused, I was jailed, kidnapped. I met some really intellectual people in jail, they actually thought that we were traitors, working for others"

Ghonim teared up during the interview as he spoke about the dozens of Egyptian citizens who lost their lives in what is now nearly three weeks of ongoing protests. Al Jazeera put up a copy of the interview, you can watch it here.

Ghonim is reportedly the creator of the Facebook page that called for protests on January 25, and it seems as if he somehow shoulders the guilt for what the pro-Mubarak thugs did to the peaceful demonstrators fighting to bring freedom and political rights to their country. But as an Egyptian friend put it, what he did helped inspire a nation, becoming a symbol of the youth movement and a potential leader for a movement that has lacked a charismatic leader until now.

Google announced Ghonim's release today via Twitter:

Ditto @Ghonim.

Repertoires of Repression and the Egypt Street: This Is Not a Facebook, Twitter or Wiki Revolution!

2011-02-02T04:24:00.007-05:00

Published on Huffington Post

It's oh so tempting for the mainstream media to give what's happening in Egypt a pithy label, and for a new media scholar like myself, I would seem to have a vested interest as well, but if I have learned anything through my five years studying cyberactivism in Egypt, it is that revolutions don't happen in cyberspace, they happen in the streets.

Hundreds of thousands of people from all walks of life across wide swaths of the country of 80 million people have taken to the streets, demanding political change. Twitter, SMS, and Facebook were certainly crucial tools used by activists to mobilize and communicate, but they were not the cause of the protests or the raison d'être.

Downtrodden and economically beleaguered citizens of Egypt who don't have smart phones or Facebook accounts and took the protests from the digital realm to the reality of the street, where tear gas and rubber bullets make it a far more significant commitment to support the protests than clicking 'like' on a webpage.

For the rest of this article click here.

My iReport on CNN about anti-Mubarak protests in Geneva

2011-01-30T15:04:00.007-05:00

About 100-150 people gathered Saturday in front of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland to demonstrate in support of the protesters in Egypt. Facing the grandiose Palais Wilson on Lake Geneva, people of all ages chanted slogans in Arabic, French and English including "Mubarak, Mubarak, this is your last day" (in Arabic), "Mubarak go to Saudi Arabia, go join Ben Ali" (In Arabic), "Get out Mubarak" (English) and the like. There were babies in carriages, high school and college kids, and adults of all ages, though the crowd seemed to like the young child of about 6 who led the chants through a bullhorn at several points. See more about this protest on CNN, which covered the demonstration as part of its series on protests around the world. CNN journalist Mia Aquina wrote:

Elsewhere in Europe, protesters in Geneva shouted slogans in Arabic, French and English, chanting, "Get out, Mubarak!" according to Courtney Radsch, who attended the demonstration there.
Radsch sent CNN a video of the protest that showed a crowd of people carrying signs that read, "Freedom. Social Justice. Democracy" and "Free Egypt."

You can see the pictures I posted here (make sure to become a follower of Freedom House!) Swiss TV also covered it here. More on protests in Geneva and elsewhere in Europe being organized via Facebook here for Switzerland and at Europe Protests for Egypt.

Pictures and video by me, licensed for reuse with attribution
Egypt demonstration in Geneva 29 Jan 2011 by Courtney C. Radsch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.radsch.info.

The Egypt Street Speaks, Government Resigns, But is that Enough?

2011-01-29T06:16:00.004-05:00

The Egyptian government resigned following a speech by Mubarak in which he completely glossed over the demands of the protesters and instead called for his government to resign. Obama also came out and gave a brief speech in which he also tiptoed around the true meaning of these protests, saying he told Mubarak that “He pledged a better democracy and greater economic opportunity,” and had “told him he has a responsibility to give meaning to those words, to take concrete steps and actions that deliver on that promise.” Really, that's it?

(Photo courtesy of Al Jazeera English)
On the 5th consecutive day of protests the Egyptian people are once again taking to the streets. Meanwhile reports that 53 people were killed yesterday in several Egyptian cities did not seem to dampen the spirits of thousands of Egyptians who have taken to the streets to demand their rights and an end to the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak. Meanwhile here in Geneva the head of the UN human rights body called on Mubarak to lift the emergency law that has been in place since he took power. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay also said in her statement that more than 1,000 people have been arrested.

And now the Saudi king is throwing his weight behind Mubarak after speaking with him on Saturday morning, even as protesters continue to call for Mubarak to go join Tunisia's ousted president Ben Ali, who fled to Saudi after his overthrow.

Follow #jan25 on Twitter for the latest.

Could there really be 'regime change' in Egypt?!

2011-01-27T15:51:00.009-05:00

It is with great excitement that I've been following the events and protests in Egypt, albeit via Twitter, Facebook and online news sites rather than on the ground as I would like! Nonetheless, as I valiantly work on finishing writing my dissertation on cyberactivism in Egypt my fingers are crossed that this time the protests will lead to substantial political change. (Photo courtesy of Al Jazeera English)

There are many digital activists trying to get information out and evade the censorship that seems to be expanding as Mubarak attempts to shut down the Internet (the state-owned TE Data handles 70% or traffic), SMS and specific platforms. We are watching citizen journalism at its best; citizens attempting to document through various media the facts on the ground as they happen, and to provide sufficient credibility so that journalists around the world can rely on their reports. And in Egypt, and other countries that lack freedom of expression and basic democratic freedoms, citizen journalism is indistinguishable from activism, and is in fact the contemporary form of political activism (my basic thesis, trying to get this chapter out the door!). Or as blogger Hossam el-Hamalawy so eloquently put it, "In a dictatorship, independent journalism by default becomes a form of activism, and the spread of information is essentially an act of agitation." If you don't read Arabic, here are a few good English-language blogs to follow (and you can also check out the blog rolls in the right-hand column): http://egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com/, http://bikyamasr.com, http://baheyya.blogspot.com/, http://www.arabawy.org/. There are many others but that's a start!

This is of course not the first time Egyptian have taken to the street demanding political change, but it is the largest in many years. And today's shooting by police of protester Mohamed Atef in advance of a call for massive protests following Friday prayers means that things have escalated beyond anything in recent memory (Mahalla, April 6, the judges demos or even the Iraq protests). 56,000 people signed up for the Facebook page within the first 24 hours, the Twitter hashtag #jan25 became a worldwide trending topic and once again the mainstream media is starry-eyed over the use of social media to galvanize, organize and mobilize Egyptians (I love how CNN calls the famous James Buck tweet "one of the earliest hints of the power of Twitter" without any context about his connections to the key digital activists who have been leading this and previous protests and without whom his tweets would likely have fallen upon deaf ears). It's hardly new anymore that people use digital and social media as an integrated part of their advocacy strategy and to galvanize offline activism (hello Iran and Tunisia, to name but two recent Middle East examples). I like Zeinobia's comment: "who said that people only revolt thanks to social networks !!? As far as I know there was no social network in 1919 or in 1977 !!??" But that's ok, because digital activists and especially those in the Middle East and other Western-supported authoritarian regimes, depend on the mainstream media to get interested and amplify their message, partially in order to put pressure on Western politicians back home (as I have written about before)

The US response has been awfully muted, though. Obama came out with a pretty weak statement about how for long-term stability Mubarak needs to move toward reform (an understatment if ever I heard one). Hillary Clinton finally called on Egypt to unblock the social networking sites that have proved so essential to the organization and mobilization of tens of thousands of Egyptians. What will Friday bring...?

Catch & Release: 1st Egyptian Blogger Imprisoned for Writings is Released

2010-11-20T10:39:00.006-05:00

(Published in Arab Media & Society)

Kareem Amer, the first Egyptian blogger to be prosecuted for the content of his writings, was released Tuesday after serving a four-year sentence for defaming Islam and President Hosni Mubarak. His sentence expired Nov. 5 but upon being released he was immediately re-arrested, pretty par for the course in terms of Egypt’s approach to dealing with its ‘problematic’ bloggers and digital activists.

Amer was a student at Al Azhar University studying law and growing increasingly disillusioned with his religion and his government. The 24-year-old started his blog in April 2005, in the height of the Kefaya movement, the genesis of cyberactivism and in the midst of a series of protests against constitutional amendments and for the independence of the judiciary.

“I am down to earth Law student; I look forward to help humanity against all form of discriminations,” Kareem wrote in his Blogger profile. “I am looking forward to open up my own human rights activists Law firm, which will include other lawyers who share the same views. Our main goal is to defend the rights of Muslim and Arabic women against all form of discrimination and to stop violent crimes committed on a daily basis in these countries.”

Kareem traversed red lines on his blog, including criticizing Islam and Christianity, assailing the Egyptian regime including Mubarak, and attacking Al Azhar University and his professors there by name. In March, 2005 he was subjected to disciplinary hearings at Al Azhar, which he chronicled on his blog, labeling them an “inquisition” by a “repressive” institution.[1] According to one fellow blogger I interviewed in Egypt for my doctoral research on digital activism, Kareem would print out hard copies of his posts and distribute it, like a newspaper, to people walking down the street. Although laws specific to Internet publishing were not yet in place in 2005, Kareem’s translation of electronic materials to hard copy printed materials meant he could be prosecuted under existing libel and defamation laws. Nov. 6 became the first time a blogger was explicitly arrested for the content of his writing rather than his activism in the streets.

His first arrest came on Oct. 25, 2005 after he posted an entry entitled “The naked truth about Islam as I saw it in Maharram Beh.” Three weeks later he was released, only to be arrested again on Nov. 6. By the next day the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI), which had positioned itself as a leading defender of freedom of expression and essential monitoring organization that became a leading reference on cyberactivism and regime response for journalists and NGOs around the world.

Two days after Kareem’s arrest the pan-Arab Al Quds al Arabi published a piece on detention followed the next day by a piece on the emerging global activist network Global Voices. Reporters Without Borders issued a press release on his detention and an article appeared in the popular liberal Arabic website Elaph. By the end of January nearly every major media outlet in the English-speaking world and beyond had published articles about his case, including the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera English, the Associated Press, Le Monde, and The Guardian, to name a few.

A bi-partisan letter by two members of the US Congress demanding Kareem’s release was the first of many high-level governmental interventions around the world, from Italy to Sweden to the United Nations. The US State Department expressed its concern and his case was mentioned in Egypt’s Universal Periodic Review at the UN Human Rights Council. Kareem became a cause célèbre of internet freedom and freedom of expression, garnering mention in the reports of every major human rights organization from Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF), the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Freedom House. In 2007 Index on Censorship bestowed its annual Freedom of Expression award on Kareem.

Perhaps more interesting, however, was the widespread support he received from fellow bloggers from across the political and religious spectrum. The self-proclaimed “cynical, snarky, pro-US, secular, libertarian, disgruntled” blogger who blogged pseudonymously under the moniker Sandmonkey came to his defense as did the Muslim Brotherhood’s first, and most famous, blogger Abdel Menem Mahmoud (Ana Ikhwan). Manal and Alaa’s joint blog Manalaa’s Bit Bucket featured the campaign and “Free Kareem” banners appeared on blogs throughout the Arab world and beyond. The rallying effect sparked by Kareem’s arrest was a powerful message to the Egyptian government and its autocratic neighbors that there was widespread support among the activist youth for freedom of expression as a fundamental right, even if the views expressed are repugnant or offensive. It was also a clarion call to the West that there were youth show shared the same values and desires as their counterparts in more open societies. Free speech, it turned out, was the common denominator that connected bloggers of all stripes and trampling on that right put them all at risk. Today the blogosphere is more diffuse and diverse than it was when the Free Kareem campaign launched.

An analysis of press, NGO and governmental attention to Kareem’s case compiled by the FreeKareem.org campaign shows that from the day of his arrest through mid-2008 there was sustained engagement on his case on a near weekly basis. Yet despite the efforts of Egypt’s most seasoned digital activists, a global online campaign that spanned continents and languages, the global media’s attention and engagement on the issue, condemnation by Western governments, and the sustained engagement of human rights and journalist rights organizations, Kareem served his four-year prison sentence. He was not released early. The Egyptian government did not bend to international pressure. And the extensive mobilization in support of his cause did little to impact Kareem’s imprisonment, although it likely prevented him from being treated more harshly, as is all to common in Egyptian prisons. Of course the by product of keeping Kareem in jail for the past four years is that the Egyptian government has remained under scrutiny for its treatment of its citizens, and especially of cyberactivists and other human rights defenders. But this likely would have been the case even without Kareem’s compelling story, leaving me to wonder whether the past four years were merely a simulcrum of effective activism.

Egypt restricts SMS messaging as elections draw near

2010-10-12T08:12:00.003-04:00

In the latest move by one of the premier "Digital Dictators", Egypt, authorities are seeking to limit the use of mobile phones for political activism. The crackdown on independent voices and citizen participation seems to picking up steam as the elections draw ever nearer. According to the leading independent daily Al Masry Al Youm, the national telecom regulatory authority is imposing restrictions on SMS messaging services that require media and mobile phone companies to obtain prior approval from the Information Ministry and the Supreme Press Council before sending news alerts.

"On Monday, a number of private media institutions--including Al-Masry Al-Youm--were notified by SMS news providers that they must now obtain approval from the Ministry of Information and the Supreme Press Council before sending news alerts out to subscribers," the newspaper said Monday, noting that the new regulations are "an apparent effort to preempt possible anti-regime activism in the run-up to next month's parliamentary elections."

It continues: "The CEO of one messaging service provider, speaking on condition of anonymity, noted that the NTRA had in recent weeks met with officials of the three mobile phone companies operating in Egypt--along with state security services--to inform them of the new regulations. He also said that special "controllers" had been mandated with monitoring text messages disseminated by the MB and by opposition youth movements."

In recent weeks Egyptian authorities have ramped up their attempts to silence critics in the lead up to presidential elections so I suppose this should come as little surprise just a week after the firing of independent editors and the cancellation of several talk shows.

Ibrahim Eissa, editor of the independent El Destor newspaper, was fired and pulled from the television talk show he hosted on private satellite TV. Another independent voice, the renowned writer Alaa El-Aswani (author of the Yacoubian Building, which was turned into a movie), announced Monday he would no longer write his weekly column in the independent daily El Shorouk.

The privately owned satellite station Orbit TV was also shut down for allegedly failing to pay its bills, although station officials disputed this and the closure came shortly after popular talk show host Amr Adeeb was prevented from airing his show.

Egypt is not the first country to restrict SMS messaging. Indian authorities did the same in Kashmir in April because of security concerns. But of course, India is a democracy. Its people have a voice and a chance to elect or not re-elect their leaders. And of course, these moves come amid Egypt's efforts to gain access to encrypted data from Blackberry as have its authoritarian neighbors Saudi Arabian and the United Arab Emirates.

Cyberactivism, the Mubarak way

2010-09-16T23:46:00.006-04:00

So what happens when president of Egypt Hosni Mubarak gets hold of a laptop with Photoshop just after his meeting with US President Barack Obama?

Here's the picture published in Al Ahram both in print and on its website:

How embarassingly unprofessional. And manipulative. And yet another great example of bloggers taking the initiative as citizen journalists to act as gatewatchers, monitoring what's coming out of the bowels of the mainstream media.Wael Khalil was the first to post documentation of the manipulated photo, but of course the independent media had a heyday.

According to the BBC "The manipulated photograph ran above an article on page six of al-Ahram's Tuesday edition, entitled The Way to Sharm el-Sheikh."
Here's what the real photograph looked like:

Egyptian rights activists on trial as victims become defendants

2010-09-12T18:08:00.005-04:00

The trial of Gamal Eid (executive director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information), Ahmed Seif El-Islam (founder of the Hisham Mubarak Law Centre) and blogger Amr Gharbeia for defamation and blackmail has put on hold until Sept. 18, and represents what one lawyer called a case that “should be studied in law schools as an example of a victim becoming a defendant.”

In 2008 Amr explained how the government and individuals (especially through the use of hisba cases) can intimidate bloggers through the arduous use of legal proceedings, noting that "the real threat is pulling people into the legal procedures that are totally draining and inhumane. This has only intensified it appears in the years, since as the government has taken stronger and more targeted action against bloggers, especially as the 2010 elections approach.

Amr told me in 2008 how the whole libel mess with the judge started... In February 2007 Amr Gharbeia stumbled upon Judge Abdel Fatah Murad who was a blogger himself, and got in touch with him. He found out Murad was writing a book about blogs and the judge asked him if he'd like to review it, to which Gharbeia said yes. But as he was reading the book Scientific and Legal Principles of Blogs he felt that many parts sounded familiar, only to discover that 50 pages of the single-authored work were actually reproductions of a 2006 report by the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information and reproduced content from several other blogs. In fact, Amr had written about the report on his blog, and as would be expected he blogged about the plagiarism in his review of Murad's book, linking to the blogs where the original work had appeared and documenting the plagiarism. The blog post elicited several comments which led to an accusation by the judge that the comment box was a form of incitement and the comments were libelous. Shortly thereafter a prosecutor tried to force Amr to turn over the IP addresses of those who made comments but he refused, he told me, though he has to filter comments now.

Murad conveniently 'forgot' to credit ANHRI, one of the leading defenders of freedom of speech and particularly bloggers in Egypt. The NGO issued a statement calling for Murad to clarify his use of sources that nine other organizations (including HMLC) signed on to. But it was the Feb. 11 press release that really got Murad up in arms and from which the current charges stem.

According to ANHRI, in April 2010 "the General Prosecutor‘s Office indicted Saif, Eid, and Gharbeia on defamation charges under articles 303, 306, 307 of the penal code, blackmail under article 327 of the penal code, which carries a penalty of up to six months imprisonment, and “abuse of the internet” under article 76 of the 2003 Communications Law, which carries with it a prison sentence and a fine of up to 20,000 Egyptian Pounds (US$3,541)."

This is not the first time judge Murad has gotten caught up in legal maneuvers to censor free expression and internet freedom, in fact, this is the third time that Murad has targeted these three rights defenders with legal action. In 2007 he tried to force the closure of more than 50 websites through the use of hisba cases, including those of ANHRI, the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, and Gharbeia's blog, but thankfully the administrative court threw out the case. In 2008 Eid, along with Egypt's First Couple of Blogging Manal and Alaa, were acquitted of similar charges. Oddly enough, since the judge was suing the government to block the sites, the bloggers were actually on the government's side! Gharbeia told me that some of the bloggers spoke with the Ministry of Interior and defended the right to maintain the sites. My how times have changed. What has not changed, however, is that the international community is watching and waiting to see what happens, and will hold the Egyptian government accountable for its treatment of its human rights defenders and citizen journalists.

BlackBerry Burqa? A take on the UAE, Saudi bans

2010-08-05T23:14:00.004-04:00

I hope this article doesn't offend anyone, but I thought it was a clever satire about the recent news that the UAE and Saudi Arabia are going to ban BlackBerry data services. In fact the announcement came just days after a group of youth attempted to organize a peaceful protest against rising gas prices using BlackBerry Messenger; they were arrested (scroll down for English), of course, but was there any mention of this in the New York Times stories Sunday, Monday, or even Tuesday? No there was not.

In any case, not to make light of the situation, but also not to loose oneself in the seriousness, it's really worth reading the satirical news article about the new BlackBerry Burqa:

New laws in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will require that every Blackberry user dress their phone a miniature burqa and face veil.

‘The Blackberry burqa means that people can still use their phones,’ said a Saudi government official, ‘but the tiny niqab that covers the screen will stop them from reading emails or accessing the Internet.’

The introduction of the burqa is intended to conceal the Blackberry from unwanted attention. With the veil in place only a tiny slit remains revealing just the time and date, thus preserving its modesty.

‘This is not about censorship or oppression,’ said UAE telecommunications regulator Mohammed al-Ghanem, ‘this is about preserving the essential purity of the Blackberry and protecting it from being corrupted.’

Some businessmen believe that making their phone wear a burqa can be very liberating. ‘It’s great,’ said one, ‘with the veil in place I am free to walk about with my Blackberry in public without the feeling that people are staring lustily at my multi-media application. It also covers my shame for not owning an iPhone.’

Some religious groups have welcomed the policy. ‘If Allah had meant us to freely access the Internet He would have given us web browsers in our heads,’ said a local imam, adding ‘There is absolutely no mention of instant messaging in the Koran and at no point did Muhammad, or any of his eleven wives, ever say LOL, ROFL or PMSL.’

If the Blackberry burqa is successful it may spread to other countries. However, experts say that dressing your phone in a burqa could result in poor reception, especially in France and Belgium.

The British government has yet to declare an official line on phone burqas although Immigration Minister Damian Green said that to ban them would be ‘very unBritish’. He went on to explain that, ‘the British thing to do, as always, is to grumble and tut.’

The Saudi government have promised that anyone who refuses to dress their Blackberry in a burqa will face harsh punishment. ‘I am not saying exactly what we will do,’ said their Minister for Justice, ‘but suffice to say that it isn’t so easy to text with your toes.’

Egyptian MPs call for using live ammo against protesters

2010-04-20T08:31:00.001-04:00

Members of the Egyptian Parliament called for the use of live ammunition against pro-democracy demonstrators, namely the April 6 youth movement and other blogger activists, ratcheting up the discourse of violence as the 2010 presidential election draws ever nearer.

National Democratic Party members also singled out the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) as being among the “motivators” of instability and “agents” of western powers in an attempt to defame and intimidate the organization amid its attempts to legally register a demonstration by the April 6 youth movement.

As the Freedom House press release noted, these were "blatant attempts to discredit activists and organizations that support freedom of expression."

As are the arrests of bloggers at the airport, a tactic that has become one of the Egyptian government's more favored harassment tactics. As I noted in the press release and in the Freedom in the World chapter on Egypt that I wrote, detention of bloggers like Alaa is one of many recent blogger arrests including Wael Abbas, Karrem Amer, Abdelrahman Ayyash, Hani Nazir, and Mosaad AbulFagr that underscores the government's systematic oppression of freedom of expression.

Despite the Egyptian government's claim in a letter to the editor of the Washington Post that “free speech is the norm” in Egypt, it’s recent crackdown on protesters and harassment of bloggers indicate otherwise.

I got a mention in our release as well:

“Detaining bloggers at the airport upon attempts to enter or exit the country has become the regime’s preferred tactic for harassing and intimidating citizen journalists and activists who blog,” said Courtney C. Radsch, Freedom House’s freedom of expression officer and writer of the Egypt country report for the soon-to-be-released Freedom of the Press 2010 survey.

Egypt is ranked Not Free in Freedom in the World 2010, Freedom House's survey of political rights and civil liberties, and Partly Free in Freedom of the Press 2009. Here are the reports for the past year, Freedom in the World 2009: Egypt and Freedom of the Press 2009: Egypt. We haven't posted the most recent yet, but next week Freedom of the Press will be released.

Egyptian blogger Alaa arrested, friends worried

2010-04-19T09:03:00.005-04:00

One of the Egyptian blogosphere's founding fathers, Alaa Abdel Fatah, has been arrested at the Cairo airport and detained. Apparently he has been charged in absentia. Follow the latest updates on Twitter at #FreeAlaa

Alaa blogs at Manalaa.net, which as of yet is not updated, but keep your eyes posted.

Crisis at IslamOnline

2010-03-16T08:03:00.003-04:00

Hundreds of journalists at the Cairo-based news site IslamOnline.net have gone on strike to protest planned staff cuts by the new Qatari management at the Al-Balagh Cultural Society. Reports that 250 of the news site's 350 employees are on strike, about 50 of whom slept overnight at the station's offices, has turned a planned 15-minute protest into an open-ended sit-in. According to Nadia el-Awady the trouble began yesterday "after problems escalated with the relatively new Qatari board of directors" amid attempts to negotiate acceptable severance packages "after learning Qatar intends on ending its contract with the Cairo office on March 31."

IslamOnline journalists have created a UStream channel where they are live-casting their strike and grievances and supporters have created a Facebook group to garner support. I've written for the website before (such as this retrospective on Iraq) and have several friends who work there (as well as former colleagues from Al Arabiya). IslamOnline is a moderate news station focused on Muslim issues that offers both news and advice on topics of interest to Muslims. Apparently some of these - such as homosexuality, pornography, marital issues - were just too much for the new management. I've worked with dozens of IslamOnline journalists and have always been impressed by the professionalism and wide-ranging interest of its journalists and staff, who are primarily Muslim but also includes some secular Muslims and even non-Muslims.

The independent daily Al Masry Al Youm quoted one of the employees on strike, Fathi Abu Hatab, that "the site’s new directors had been interfering in editorial content and seeking to alter the moderate tone and diversity of that content, which he says are the site’s signatures." Apparently a few months ago there was a shakeup of the board of the Islamic Message Society, the Qatar-based NGO that funds the site, which has been in existence since 1997.

Bikya Masr reports that there are plans to liquidate the Cairo offices and relocate to Qatar. According to the Hisham Mubarak Law Center, workers met with the board "only days earlier 'to listen to their demands and questions with promises from Ibrahim Al Ansari, Islam Online Vice-President, to meet these demands, but according to the sources, this meeting turned out to be a kind of stalling and wasting time in preparation to fire the workers'.”

I'm waiting to hear from friends and colleagues. For now, keep an eye on the Facebook page and let's see what happens.

Google Hackers Targeted Source Code of More Than 30 Companies

2010-01-15T08:54:00.001-05:00

Google Hackers Targeted Source Code of More Than 30 Companies

Posted using ShareThis

Lebanon to host 2010 world newsaper conference

2009-12-18T02:20:00.002-05:00

Lebanon's Al-Nahar will host the 2010 annual meeting of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. The June meeting will be the first time in its 63 year history the congress will beheld in the Arab world.

"The time is right for the world's press to meet in the Arab world, which has so much influence on world affairs, where the media is developing at a rapid rate, but which continues to struggle with repression of the basic human right to freedom of expression," Timothy Balding, co-CEO of the WAN-IFRA), was quoted as saying.

"And it is particularly appropriate to hold these meetings in Beirut, where the independent press has played a leading role for freedom and the right to speak out, not only in Lebanon, but in the entire Arab world."

WAN-IFRA multiblog:www.wan-ifra.org/blogs/wanindia2009
World Editors Forum blog:www.editorsweblog.org
Twitter: @WANIndia2009, @NewspaperWorld and the M&G's Trevor Ncube, @3bucn
Twitter Search: WANindia09 or #WAN

Egypt uphold fines for newspaper editors, overturns jail sentences

2009-12-08T15:17:00.003-05:00

No time for analysis but thought this was important to cover, so from the Daily News Egypt

"The Cairo Appeals Court overturned a one-year jail sentence and upheld a LE 20,000 fine for each of the four newspaper editors convicted for insulting President Hosni Mubarak and defaming government officials.

The four editors of opposition and independent newspapers received a one-year jail sentences and a LE 20,000 fine in September 2007 after the court found them guilty of “publishing false information likely to disturb public order.”

Best Buy ad celebrating Eid al-Adha has Right Wing in a tizzy

2009-11-24T23:09:00.003-05:00

Apparently the right wing crazies are up in arms again about the fact that it happens to be a Muslim holiday - Eid al-Adha. In fact Muslims have been having holidays for the past 1430 years so perhaps it's not that big of a deal if a store like say, Best Buy, wants to acknowledge the fact.

As it turns out, this is probably the first time a retailer has sent out such Islamic holy day greetings, according to CAIR (Council on Islamic Relations). And what happened?

Vitriolic spewing by hateful narrow-minded people who have no respect for others, such as this Best Buy forum demonstrates. Why is it either Christmas or Eid. Either Hannukah or holiday? This article at Right Pundits pretty much sums up their thinking. In my opinion, exploit them all! On one hand people complain about the commercialization of [fill in holiday here] and on the other, everyone wants a piece of the action. Go ahead, sell your soul. Let companies and corporations exploit your holy day for profit and consumerist values. Of course, they should also have sent out Happy Thanksgiving ones. And maybe they did, it's unclear. I know I haven't seen any Eid flyers but I've seen so many "Thanksgiving Sale" ads that it's hard to keep track of whether I'm supposed to wake up at 4 am or 5 am to get the big sale. What?! Do "they" really want me to get up that early to shop?! Anyway, happy Thanksgiving to all Americans, happy Eid to all Muslims and happy whatever to whomever you are and want recognition :)

* Thanks to John Biggs at Crunch Gear for the picture of the ad

Critical article about censorship in Emirates media

2009-11-24T10:32:00.002-05:00

I just came across an interesting article in Al-Akhbar, a Lebanese newspaper, about censorship in the Emirates and the role the governments are or are not playing in improving professionalism and transparency.

Davidson discusses the obstacles to transparency and liberalization as well as the free flow of information posed by the Ministry of Information and Culture, which deals with all sorts of publishing and media distribution. And he points out that although there is a new media law that prevents journalists from being put in jail, the fines are prohibitive and enforces the self-censorship many journalists there were brought up with in the Middle East.

He also notes the inherent contradiction of having the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority monitor and likely spy on internet usage in addition to blocking unknown numbers of sites even as the crown prince is going on and on about the need for transparency.

He offers as examples the anecdote about the failure of the UAE-based media failed to cover the royal family torture video (a 45-minute video in which Sheikh Issa, brother of the ruler, tortures a man by shoving sand in his mouth, beats him with a nail and board, held down by men in uniform etc). Several governments in the region blocked access to the video on YouTube as they did to the site UAE Torture.

In case you missed it, here's ABC's report on the torture video. Obviously I couldn't write about this while I was in Dubai until the official media did, and even when WAM finally wrote about Issa's detention and I wrote an article for Al Arabiya, I could only use the word abuse, not torture.

How do you say "internet" in Arabic?

2009-11-18T02:22:00.001-05:00

Egypt has apparently started registering the first Arabic-language internet domain names at dot.msr during the 4th Internet Governance Forum (happening in its very own seaside resort of Sharm el-Sheikh) in a move critics of the regime's perspective on free speech and internet freedom find hypocritical and probably on par with the US or Libya heading up the UN Human Rights Commission. The move came Monday after ICANN, the international organization that handles domain naming, began registration for non-Latin-character domain names.

Arabic domain names could tear down the English-only internet and usher in a a new era of access and participation that could encourage Arabic businesses to engage with the web not to mention the less educated and unilingual Arabic speakers in the 22 Arabic-speaking states of the Middle East.

Or it could usher in a time of cyber-sovereignty, with countries vying for control over who controls which languages. Will Saudi Arabia fight to control Arabic naming? What happens if someone wants to register a curse word (apparently f*ck.me was snatched up as soon as .me was made available) or a slur against Islam? I wonder how (not if) this will be regulated... What is the process for asserting ownership or making legal claims? As this professor noted "If somebody who lives in Vancouver wants to register 'dot Tibet,' what's the process for objecting to that, if the Chinese government feels that's inappropriate? And who decides what's appropriate and what's not?"

But the language expansion also undermines American hegemony over the vast information infrastructure that has so impacted the daily lives of richer nations where connectivity and computer ownership are the norm. Although the majority of web pages may be in English today,this is likely to change in the near future (Chinese is predicted to become the most popular language of the internet).

So what does this mean for the mechanics of the web business? Well, search engine optimization (or SEO in the parlance of the biz as it were) just got a lot more interesting. URLs play a key role in SEO and until now non-Latin languages were locked out of some of the most lucrative aspects of online development. For example, commercialization of the internet and use by businesses in the Arab world lags behind that of the US and Western Europe in part because Arabic is not as competitive as English online. That's about to change.

What do I mean by the last statement? Well, this article describes how Google, for example, determines page rank (which for many business translates into a measure of its existential worth as well as its financial and PR health)

"Google looks at many elements to determine how to rank relevance, but the URL has been one of the most paramount. That's why people spend lots of money buying up heavily searched single- or double-word URLs. Those who jump into the search fray and buy up the new domain names consisting of heavily searched-on words, such as free, games, music, cell phones and sex, will capitalize on ranking for those words in search engines, according to Eli Feldblum CTO and founder at RankAbove, an Israeli-based SEO company."

The Muslim Brotherhood's leadership challenge a "milestone"

2009-11-16T12:02:00.006-05:00

The supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Mohamed Mahdi Akef, has decided to step down at the end of his first term in January 2010 in what blogger and activist Ibrahim al-Houdaiby calls "an important milestone for the largest opposition group in Egypt." In his article Brotherhood Faces Leadership Challenge for the Arab Reform Bulletin Houdaiby explains why it's unlikely a reformist will be chosen as a successor and why the MB might just wait until the 2010 parliamentary and 2011 presidential elections since that is seen as a potential turning time for several key leaders who have been jailed following what many human rights observers called sham trials at secret military tribunals. Houdaiby gives two explanations for why this decision marks a milestone:

First, whoever the successor is, he will not enjoy the same historical legitimacy as Akef, who joined the Brotherhood at an early stage and worked with its founder, Hassan al-Banna. All of the potential replacements belong to another generation and lack the gravitas of Akef and his predecessors, which helped them resolve or at least postpone some organizational disputes.
The second reason is that Akef, who presided over a major political opening of the group in which its various intellectual orientations were clearly manifested, has the ability to manage diversity. This has been clear in his relations with leaders of the organization’s different currents and generations and his ability to bridge gaps between them. No candidate for the post seems to possess this skill, except perhaps Deputy Guide Khairat al-Shater, whose chances seem nil because he is currently imprisoned.

Shater indeed would be an interesting choice. His children are very active in the new media realm, and have been at the forefront of cyberactivism as it relates to the Muslim Brotherhood.

His daughter Zahra has led the campaign among bloggers and reached out to journalists and human rights organizations to support her father and condemn the tribunals. Children of the imprisoned leaders created a blog called Ensaa some years ago to track information on the secret trials and other issues related to their fathers' imprisonments. Since only families were allowed to visit the prison or attend the trial, and only sometimes, they were the only ones in a position to provide information and coverage on the trails and thus to the mainstream media.

Al Jazeera becomes leading Mideast sports broadcaster with ART buy

2009-11-13T02:40:00.005-05:00

According to Gulf Times, the Arabic satellite news station Al Jazeera is poised to become the largest sports broadcaster in the Arab region with its reportedly billion dollar purchase of the Arab Radio and Television (ART) network. According to the article, the deal has not yet been announced formally, but it will give Al Jazeera exclusive rights that will likely see it become the leading sports network in the region. Last week, the UAE daily the National reported that the head of ART's public relations Nawaf Tamimi, said there was no rights deal, following press reports claiming ART had sold its extensive library to Al Jazeera Sports channel. "Rumors have been swirling around the Middle East media water cooler for a while now that the two pay-TV players that weren't a part of this summer's merger between Orbit and Showtime -- that is, Arab Radio and Television (ART) and Al Jazeera Sports -- are up to some kind of merging of their own," writes Keach Hagey. Looks like they are, just as AJ Sports celebrates its sixth year.

Dubai Media Not-So-Free Zone

2009-11-01T23:05:00.000-05:00

This is the notice I get when I try to access the photo-sharing site Flikr in the UAE. Or any site ending in .ir for Israel. And on a host of other sites that Emirati authorities have decided is not acceptable. And I work in Dubai Media City, a supposedly "free" zone. Apparently not a zone for free speech.

I also can't call any Israeli numbers - which of course also cuts me off from Palestinians living in Israeli occupied territories as well as business and government contacts that could be needed to ensure proper, adequate and balanced coverage.

As a journalist I need to track down information and contact details for people all over the world. Yet the Dubai authorities have decided to censor my access to information. How can they call it a Media Free Zone when in fact it is not free at all?

(I originally wrote this post on Sept. 29 but decided not to post until leaving Dubai upon the advice of friends in the media field. Given that TECOM contacted me merely one day after posting this article I am glad I waited!)

P.S. The character above is one of the four grandmothers that star in the Emirati-created cartoon Freej, which I absolutely adore! Too bad she's used for such a negative purpose...

Emirate's Airlines: the story I was forced out over

2009-10-29T07:44:00.001-04:00

Here is the original story I posted on AlArabiya.net about Emirates Airlines that I was forced to take down. Now that I am safely out of the country I wanted people to see what the story was all about. I removed the name of the first reporter upon her request since she still works at Al Arabiya and lives in Dubai.

Now, you'll notice that we specifically did not point out the major conflict of interest in the last section and I didn't use any of the quotes pointing out that because Maktoum is the head of the Aviation Authority that his airline therefore has carte blanche to do whatever it wants. I knew this would be crossing a "red line," to highlight how incredibly ridiculous such a setup is. But the public should know if an airline is unsafe, if the authority charged with regulating airlines is unable to do so fairly and impartially. So, here you go, here's the story that I was "made redundant" over. What do you think?

Pilots say airline puts commercial considerations before safety
Emirates airlines under fire for neglecting safety
DUBAI (Courtney C. Radsch)

Emirates Airlines came under fire Sunday after pilots complained it put commercial considerations ahead of safety and said that was the reason behind a near-fatal crash in Melbourne earlier this year, a charge the airline "strongly refuted."

The unnamed pilots said they warned authorities three months before the incident about the problem of pilot fatigue and concern of inadequate crew rest facilities, Australia’s Sunday Herald Sun reported, citing documents obtained under United States Freedom of Information laws.

" Crews cannot get proper in-flight rest and suffer from fatigue and micro-sleep during the approach and landing phases on the Airbus A380 and on the A340-300 "

Australian paper quotes a pilot

The pilots were also concerned about scheduling, working hours and their belief management was putting commercial considerations ahead of safety, the paper said.

"Crews cannot get proper in-flight rest and suffer from fatigue and micro-sleep during the approach and landing phases on the Airbus A380 and on the A340-300," the paper quoted the official complaint as saying.

"There has been continuous pressure from the commercial department ... flight safety is becoming increasingly impaired," the complaint added.

Emirates was hit hard by the financial crisis and recorded a loss of nearly a billion dollars last year. The airline ranks amongst the top ten in the world and has won several awards, including the largest airline in the Middle East.

Near-fatal crash

" The crew of EK 407 (Melbourne-Dubai, 20 March) were allocated a 24-hour layover in Melbourne - a sufficient time period to use the rest facilities provided "

Richard Vaughan

Emirates airlines "strongly refuted" the report and questioned why none of the data it provided about the incident was reported in the article, which the airline blasted as "one-sided" and "based on statements from anonymous persons."

"The crew of EK 407 (Melbourne-Dubai, 20 March) were allocated a 24-hour layover in Melbourne - a sufficient time period to use the rest facilities provided," Richard Vaughan, Emirates’ Divisional Senior Vice President and Commercial Operations Worldwide, said in a statement released to Al Arabiya.

"When it released its preliminary report on the event, the Australian Transport and Safety Bureau indicated it had not found any evidence to suggest fatigue was a causal factor," Vaughan said, adding "Emirates reiterates its absolute commitment to safety."

" Of course it’s a problem with safety "

Emirates Airline employee

The incident in question happened in March when an Emirates jet narrowly escaped a fatal crash at Melbourne Airport after the captain, who had reportedly only slept for three-and-a-half hours over the past 24 hours, entered the wrong take-off weight into the plane's computer.

None of the crew or staff noticed the error and the plane, which was programmed to take off with 100 tons less than the actual weight on board, dragged its tail along the runway and almost failed to get airborne with 275 people on board.

Upon returning to Dubai both pilots were handed letters of resignation and the airline said it had implemented new safety measures to stop something like that from happening again.

Pilots, crew fatigued

" The sad thing is that in the event of the worst happening it will be the fatigued pilots who will be in the dock, dead or alive, and not the people in management who dreamt up, approved and enforced the misguided policy "

Pilot

According to the Australian paper, several complaints were lodged with the American regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), three months before EK407 nearly crashed into a suburb.

The FAA documents show that pilots complained to an Emirates’ senior vice president, Captain Ed Davidson, about fatigue.

"I am very concerned that the commercial versus safety balance in this airline is tipping in the wrong direction," a pilot was quoted as saying in the FAA document.

"The sad thing is that in the event of the worst happening it will be the fatigued pilots who will be in the dock, dead or alive, and not the people in management who dreamt up, approved and enforced the misguided policy," the pilot said.

An Emirates Airline employee who requested anonymity because of concerns over job security told Al Arabiya that fatigue is problem with pilots and cabin crew, and that flight shifts are scheduled too close together.

“We should take longer rests between such sectors, especially to Australia and New York and long shifts,” the employee told Al Arabiya, noting that crews often fly 14 continuous hours, such as on the Dubai-Sydney route, and the continue on another few hours to New Zealand.

The employee added that the cabin crew also suffered from fatigue and are having more trouble than the flight decks.

“Of course it’s a problem with safety,” the employee said.

Investigating

No safety regulator, including Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA), is authorized to investigate the complaints as international rules prevent broad-ranging audits of foreign airlines.

But a spokesman for CASA, Peter Gibson, told the paper Australia's aviation authority had no concerns over Emirates safety and was satisfied with the airline’s response to pilot fatigue.

The only organizations authorized to investigate the claims against the Dubai-based airline is the Dubai Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the United Arab Emirates' General Civil Aviation Authority (GCAA).

The chairman of the government-owned airline, Sheik Ahmed bin Saeed al-Maktoum, is also president of the CAA and on the board of the GCAA.

Government service: not such an oxymoron at TECOM

2009-10-19T03:28:00.002-04:00

TECOM, the Dubai Technology and Media Free Zone authority, is the government agency of Dubai responsible for the so-called "free zones" like Media City, Internet City, Knowledge Village etc. (although funnily enough it does not have a working website!). I had to go to the office for an employment issue and was so astonished by the efficiency, helpfulness and overall competency of a government department that I felt compelled to write a post. Although the office looks like the DMV of something (that is, the Department of Motor Vehicles in the US), down to the rows of windows with glowing red numbers above calling the herds to the appropriate window. People milled around as they waited their turn. But unlike going to the DMV, one of the more painful experiences in life, I actually enjoyed going to this government department! What?! First of all, the wait was super short despite all the people. Probably because the workers are competent (sorry, no offense to the competent DMV peeps out there). So anyway, we get our ticket and shortly thereafter are called to the appropriate window where I explained that I wanted to lodge a complaint. I began in Arabic out of respect for the fact that I was speaking to an Emirati, but he actually spoke English (again, how many times have you been unable to communicate with someone at the DMV). He told me I needed a copy of my passport, labor contract and a form in order to file the complaint. So I left thinking I'd have to go find an internet cafe with a printer or a Kinkos or something, when lo and behold, there was a deck of computers with free printing! What?! So I got on an filed out the form, printed it out and was going to go home to get a copy of my contract etc. I figured there was no way I could log onto my email, I mean, they already let me fill out my form online and print it. But in fact, I was able to access my email, get all the documents I needed printed out (for free!!) and file the complaint the same day. In fact, within 1 hour of finding out where and what TECOM was I had completed my task. And when I call to follow up I get a real person who has my point of contact call me back. And he remembers my name and my case. I wish the US government and its employees would take a page from TECOM's playbook. When everything else in life is turning sour and stressful, it's nice to find a ray of light in an experience one would ordinarily dread. Now TECOM just needs to get it's website activated!

Ramadan advertising a casualty of the financial downturn

2009-09-24T23:06:00.002-04:00

Spending on advertising during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, TV’s holy grail of ratings, fell compared to last year according to industry experts, whose initial optimism about the season proved unwarranted.

The industry was hoping for a recovery during Ramadan, which is typically the biggest advertising season in the Middle East, when each day people watch TV two hours more on average and indulge in food, drink and sweets for the festive dinners that break each day’s fast.

But the Choueiri Group, the Middle East’s largest media sales representation company, said advertising spend declined during Ramadan, which this year started Aug. 21 and ended Sept. 19 in most Arab countries.

“This year, the overall scene has witnessed a drop in advertising spend,” Ghassan Harfouche, managing director of Middle East Media Services at Choueiri Group, told the Emirati daily the National. He said spending fell by 25 percent.

The Middle East, especially the Gulf, has been hard hit by the global financial crisis, which hit the real estate and financial sectors, some of the biggest advertisers during the halcyon boom days, hardest.

The fall came even though most broadcasters left rates unchanged from last year’s record rates, AdNation’s Eliot Beer told me.

“From people I’ve spoken to in the market it seems to be down, some suggest a drop of 20-30 percent overall would be about right for the TV market,” said Beer.

Many regional companies devote more than half their budgets to buying ad time during Ramadan, with TV dominating the advert buys. And the month typically accounts for about a third of annual advertising revenues for leading television broadcasters.

But the economic downturn has hit the industry hard, with initial indications showing a dramatic decline compared to the highs of 2008, though industry insiders say the region has not been hit as hard as other markets.

Michael Malkoun, regional sales director for Choueiri Group, attributed the drop to a fall off in advertising by local companies, especially those in Saudi Arabia, defying forecasts that any decline in spending would come from multinational corporations and regional advertisers.

“Which was surprising because nobody was aware or expecting that to happen, we were all expecting it from the regional side not the local side,” he told me. “They (regional advertisers) wanted to protect their market shares here, so they kept their level of spend.”

Difficulty of Predictions

The negative results contradicted early indications of a strong Ramadan advertising season that would help turnaround an industry hard hit by the implosion of the property sector.

The Pan Arab Research Center (PARC) said midway through Ramadan that preliminary data showed an increase of around 15 to 20 percent compared to 2008 and it had predicted increased advertising spending this Ramadan.

But experts note that the Middle East advertising industry is underdeveloped, saturated on some platforms and nearly absent on others, with few metrics. They say the lack of research, measurement and ratings hampers the development of a more robust industry.

“There are no proper mechanisms in place for measurements,” explained Sonia Larsen, communications director for the International Advertising Association’s United Arab Emirates chapter, the largest one in the world.

She said there are discussions about introducing people meters and other tools for audience measurement, but that they will take time to get integrated.

The Middle East accounts for only one percent of global advertising expenditure and average per capita investment in advertising is a fraction of that in Western countries, where industry averages are eight percent per capita.

Ramadan Bonanza

Advertisers appeared to have saved their budgets for “sure things,” with major broadcasters of Ramadan specials like MBC1 and Rotana attracting advertising on par with last year

“Compared to last year, sales are up 30 per cent,” Nezar Nagro, the president of Saudi-owned Rotana Media Services, said as Ramadan got underway in late August. “I think some of the clients that didn’t spend in the first half of this year, because they were worried about the recession, have now started to spend.”

The Arab Advisors Group (AAG) reported that a 30-second Ramadan spot cost $3,362 this year, though ad executives told me that so much depends on the show’s ratings and reach as well as the specific market that such averages are meaningless.

Regional heavyweight MBC Group, which boasts all of the top 10 highest rated shows, was able to sell spots for upwards of $35,000 for the top-rated Ramadan series Bab al-Hara, which reaches more than 50 percent of viewers, according to Austyn Allison, managing editor of the Dubai-based Communicate magazine.

Its Arabic flagship MBC1 boasts some of the most popular Ramadan series, and typically invests about a third of its acquisition and production budget on the channel, which returns a similar percentage, MBC Group director of marketing, PR and commercial Mazen Hayek, told me

“In Ramadan, MBC1 becomes in a league of its own when it comes to its ratings,” said Hayek. “This has led to sustained advertising on MBC 1. The levels are very close to 2008, which was by all means a record year.”

Fall from 2008 highs

Middle East advertising dropped off sharply at the end of 2008 as the world financial crisis hit the Gulf and devastated the property and financial sectors. It did not pick up as expected after the traditionally lean winter months of January and February, so the industry was looking to Ramadan to rescue its sagging fortunes.

Yet despite the global economic downturn, advertising is slightly up overall this year, with increases in several Gulf and Levant countries, according to PARC.

Regional broadcasters were the big winners this year as advertisers focus more on pan-Arab satellite stations like LBC, Fox Movies and MBC, parent company of Al Arabiya, with seven of its eight channels ranking in the top ten for ratings, according to Allison.

And these stations have seen the highest-ever ad rates, according to AAG, with rates on major channels 25 percent higher than the year before, though still low by global standards, especially considering the purchasing power of viewers in the Gulf.

Saudi opens first-ever coed university

2009-09-23T20:17:00.001-04:00

Saudi Arabia’s new $10 billion, state-of-the-art science and technology university welcomes the country’s first coed student body Wednesday in one of the king’s keystone attempts to power his country into the 21st century with renewable energy and social reform, much to the chagrin of the conservative religious establishment. Of course, we didn't write this in the Al Arabiya story, though I certainly beefed it up from the Arabic version. Check out Saudi looks to the future, opens coed university for more about the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, which has one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, state-of-the-art “green” technologies and a team of top scientists. As I write in the article:

Although the kingdom’s laws still apply, social rules will be more relaxed - like in the compounds where foreign oil workers live – according to several international newspapers.

Women will not have to cover themselves and will also be allowed to drive, according to reports. There will also be a movie theater – usually forbidden in the kingdom -- at the commercial center, according to the university’s website.

Let's see. Definitely a good start!

UAE may allow foreigners to fully own businesses

2009-09-14T21:30:00.003-04:00

Foreigners may soon be allowed to own 100 percent of their business in the United Arab Emirates if a proposed law is finalized, local media reported Monday.
“The law to allow 100 percent foreign investment is ready, but still under study and should be finalized within the next two months. We are especially looking into certain sectors such as hi-tech and hi-value,” Minister of Economy Sultan Bin Saeed al-Mansouri told the quasi-governmental Gulf News.

" It sends a very strong signal to foreign investors that the country is open "

Wasseem Mina, economics professor

Currently foreign companies can only own 49 percent of a business and must have an Emirati partner unless they are located in a free zone.

The change is designed to attract foreign businesses to a country hard-hit by the world financial crisis that has seen property prices plummet and an exodus of expatriate workers.

For more read my article on Al Arabiya News | UAE may allow full foreign businesses ownership

Men on notice after sperm are made from stem cells

2009-07-08T23:36:00.002-04:00

Apparently men may be fungible: Sperm made from stem cells put men on notice What will science give us next? Of course, I guess we're not going to be rid of them that easily ;) Dr. Lori Covey at Rutgers told me that the research did not show the sperm could fertilize an egg or do everything a an actual sperm could do. And since so many events in the early stages of fertilization impact whether gestation occurs, it was too early understand the implications of the findings for infertility treatment.

So the verdict on men? According to Lori: “I don’t think we’re anywhere close to being rid of men!"

Google, Facebook move up launches in Persian to help Iranian reformists

2009-06-19T12:57:00.004-04:00

Google launched its Persian automatic translation service Friday just hours after Facebook announced a beta-version of the social networking site, because of the ongoing protests in Iran over election results that gave incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, a second term.

"We feel that launching Persian is particularly important now, given ongoing events in Iran. Like YouTube and other services, Google Translate is one more tool that Persian speakers can use to communicate directly to the world, and vice versa, increasing everyone's access to information," Franz Och, principal scientist, wrote on the company's blog.

The California-based company, which also owns the video sharing site YouTube, moved up the launch of its 42nd language in beta version as did Facebook. Och said Google was "launching this service quickly, so it may perform slowly at times," adding that it was optimized for English-Farsi translations.

Facebook, popular with reformists who used it to build support for their candidate and disseminate information after the results, announced late Thursday night that the site would be available in Farsi, allowing Iranian users to navigate in their native language.

"Since the Iranian election last week, people around the world have increasingly been sharing news and information on Facebook about the results and its aftermath," Eric Kwan, a Facebook engineer working to localize the site, wrote on Facebook's official blog.

Facebook Persian was "already in translation before worldwide attention turned to the Iranian elections, but because of the sudden increase in activity we decided to launch it sooner than planned. This means that the translation isn't perfect, but we felt it was important to help more people communicate rather than wait," said Facebook.

Google also relaxed restrictions on violent and graphic videos from the protests in Iran posted to YouTube in recognition of the critical roll user-generated content was playing in the country, where foreign media have been banned from covering the protests.

"In general, we do not allow graphic or gratuitous violence on YouTube," the company said in a statement. "However, we make exceptions for videos that have educational, documentary, or scientific value. The limitations being placed on mainstream media reporting from within Iran make it even more important that citizens in Iran be able to use YouTube to capture their experiences for the world to see."

The visas of most foreign journalists, typically granted for seven days, ran out earlier in the week and were not renewed in an attempt by the government to control coverage of the largest demonstrations since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Despite media frenzy and the re-discovery of Twitter it's nothing terribly new, especially for tech savvy Iranian youth who have already created one of the most dynamic blogospheres in the world. Activists Moldova, China, Burma/Myanmar, Egypt to name but a few have all used citizen journalism tools and social media to further their cause and circumvent varying levels of government censorship and control.

But the story of anti-government protesters using new media tools - which just happen to have emerged from American companies -- fits into the framework of Iran created by the West, especially the United States, as an authoritarian religious state that needs to be reformed. So the mainstream media has amplified the voices and perspective of reformers, and largely focused on one side while offering very little examination of either pro-government rallies or pro-Ahmedinejad voters and where their voices fit in the turmoil. So actually Ahmedinejad's attempt to control coverage seems to hace backfired because I doubt that pro-government demonstrators are exerting the same amount of effort to get their perspective and images and videos out to the world public as the reformer foes.

Throughout the week, supporters of the protesters around the world had been making their own computers available as proxies to Iranians who wanted to evade government censors. These people have been publishing the IP addresses of their computers to public forums like Twitter, offering them as so-called proxy servers. continued Internet activity from Iran was a testament to the durability of the Internet and the commitment of Iranians to get their story out despite the government crackdown.

The vast majority of bloggers are young, and the youth were overwhelmingly in support of Mousavi, especially city-based affluent youth, who are also more likely to be technologically savvy with access to private Internet connections and the technical know-how to use proxy servers to get around state censorship. Thus the citizen journalism coming out of Iran is skewed by the population that is producing it, and thus an incomplete picture of sentiment in Iran. That said, youth make up some 60% of the Iranian population

The government is fighting back with the same methods. Ahmediniejad supporters have sought to infiltrate reformists online, passing themselves off as reformists while posting news and views sympathetic to the pro-government side. Users on Twitter sent out false tweets purporting to be from a Western journalist with a major network. But he told me his followers quickly surmised the tweet from persian_guy was a ploy and sent out warnings accordingly. Lists of impersonators are kept and updated for everyone to be aware of.

The Revolution will be Twittered... this time in Iran

2009-06-16T15:47:00.003-04:00

Iranian activists successfully got Twitter to suspend a planned interruption of service today because it has become an indispensable communication tool. Twitter and the other new media applications of the day -- Facebook, Flikr, YouTube and all -- have once again become indispensable tools in the repertoires of contention of activists in a less-than-democratic country.

So when Twitter announced Monday it would temporarily suspend the service for an hour the next day it immediately spurred a wave of requests not to take away what has become a key communication and organizational tool for post-election activism. Iran has taken press credentials from foreign media and kicked them out of the country and banned their broadcasts. It shut Al Arabiya's Tehran bureau and imprisoned journalists. But it ca't stop Twitter, which works via Internet and mobile phones and is too dispersed and instantaneous and pervasive to block. So real information and images are getting out.

“@twitter Twitter is currently our ONLY way to communicate overnight news in Iran, PLEASE do not take it down,” wrote Moussavi1388, a feed with nearly 11,000 followers that serves as a virtual newsroom, providing information about protests and press conferences. People began posting tweets about the need to prevent the planned outage and shortly after 4 p.m. Monday, Tuesday morning in Iran, the company announced it would suspend the planned upgrade in acknowledgment of its role in facilitating communication in and out of Iran.

Messages with #IranElection, a tag that enables users to search for all tweets on that subject, was the most popular tag on Twitter Tuesday, with more than 70 new posts a minute coming in Tuesday night. Tehran was the second most popular.

Mosavi’s Facebook page, which lists his current position as “president” or Iran, has more than 54,000 members posting pictures and videos that are helping to document the largest protests since the 1979 Islamic revolution as well as government violence that has left at least eight activists dead.

But blogs and Twitter feeds can also be seen by governmental authorities, prompting a campaign Tuesday evening to encourage people around the world to change their profiles to help protect activists in Iran.

“Help cover the bloggers: change your twitter settings so that your location is TEHRAN and your time zone is GMT +3.30” read the tweets sent by hundreds of users in an effort to make it more difficult for the government to track down those blogging inside Iran.

This is certainly not the first time Twitter has helped activists organize, as I've written many posts about its use in Egypt in particular (it has also been used in Moldova, Lebanon, China, etc). But of course, my detailed research is on Egypt, so if you want to read more about how activists in the Middle East use Twitter click here!

Iran's official news sites hacked by activists

2009-06-15T18:30:00.000-04:00

Iranians sympathetic to reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi, who lost his election bid against the incumbent president, fought back against a government crackdown on media by hacking official news websites Sunday.

Activists dissatisfied with what they say were fraudulent elections that saw President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad elected to a second term with a landslide 63 percent of the vote, organized a denial of service campaign through Facebook that appeared to have caused the websites of several official news agencies to crash.

The official IRNA and FARS news agencies websites could not be displayed for several hours in the morning, Press TV’s site delivered a server busy message while the official parliament site, Majlis.ir, gave an unending "still working" message.

The websites of IRIB, the official broadcaster, Sepah News, the Revolutionary Guard's newspaper and Kehan, the conservative government mouthpiece, were also unavailable.

"Giveourvoteback"

An Iranian youth wears a green ribbon as a support sign for Mousavi at an Internet cafe
A note posted on Facebook urged supporters dissatisfied with the vote results to download a file called “giveourvoteback” that would send requests to the various official websites effectively creating a denial of service because of too many server requests and crashing the sites.

Facebook, used by supporters of rival reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi to rally support, was blocked in the weeks leading up to the election and in the wake of post-election demonstrations. But Iranians at home, using proxies, and abroad fought back by causing the denial of service of several official government news sites.

The campaign came amid the third day of violent protests and a continued government crackdown on the media, especially foreign press.

Foreign media crackdown

Since the contested election results were announced Saturday, Iran has jammed satellite signals and the Internet, shut down Al Arabiya’s Tehran bureau and arrested several journalists.

Australian, Belgian, Canadian, French and Italian journalists have been detained or beaten and some of their equipment confiscated, Reza Moini, Reporters Without Borders Iran researcher, told Al Arabiya.

He said the crackdown on foreign journalists is “because they publish truthful information about what happened and the official media do not do so.”

Nabil Khatib, Al ArabiyaArab satellite station Al Arabiya was informed by officials Sunday that its Tehran bureau would be closed for a week and it would be prevented from broadcasting.

“Al Arabiya is worried about being banned from the chance to cover an important country like Iran during an important event like the elections and afterwards without explaining the reason behind that decision,” said Nabil Khatib, executive news manager of Dubai-based Al Arabiya.

The British Broadcasting Corporation said the satellites it used to broadcast BBC Persian television to Iran were being jammed and that a reporter and his crew were briefly detained after filming a post-election piece.

German TV editors"BBC audiences in Iran, the Middle East and Europe may be experiencing disruption to their BBC TV or radio services today. That is because there is heavy electronic jamming of one of the satellites the BBC uses in the Middle East to broadcast the BBC Persian TV signal to Iran," the BBC said Sunday.

BBC World Service director Peter Horrocks said it "seems to be part of a pattern of behavior by the Iranian authorities to limit the reporting of the aftermath of the disputed election."

German public TV stations ARD and ZDF said their correspondents were prevented from the covering the protests, the largest in at least a decade.

"We see a breach of freedom of the press and democratic principles," the editors wrote.

Hackers crash official Iran news sites: Exclusive

2009-06-15T06:52:00.004-04:00

My team and I discovered this morning that several official Iranian news sites were down after a Facebook note went out telling supporters to download a file that would cause denial of service and crash the sites.

From the article I just wrote and posted on Al Arabiya about the hacking, which followed just a day after Iran officials closed Al Arabiya's Tehran bureau for a week.

"Iranians sympathetic to reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi, who lost his election bid against the incumbent president, fought back against a government crackdown on media by hacking official news websites Sunday.

Activists dissatisfied with what they say were fraudulent elections that saw President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad elected to a second term with a landslide 63 percent of the vote, organized a denial of service campaign through Facebook that caused the websites of several official news agencies to crash.

The official IRNA and FARS news agencies websites could not be displayed for several hours in the morning, Press TV’s site delivered a server busy message while the official parliament site, Majlis.ir, gave an unending still working message.

The websites of IRIB, the official broadcaster, Sepah News, the Revolutionary Guards newspaper and Kehan, the conservative government mouthpiece, were also unavailable.

A note posted on Facebook urged supporters dissatisfied with the vote results to download a file called “giveourvoteback” that would send requests to the various official websites effectively creating a denial of service because of too many server requests and crashing the sites.

Facebook, used by supporters of rival reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi to rally support, was blocked in the weeks leading up to the election and in the wake of post-election demonstrations. But Iranians at home, using proxies, and abroad fought back by causing the denial of service of several official government news sites.

The campaign came amid the third day of violent protests and a continued government crackdown on the media, especially foreign press. (for the rest of the article click here)

So... yesterday Iran told Al Arabiya that we would not be able to broadcast from Tehran for the next week. Conveniently this would prevent coverage of the enormous protests that have wracked the capital and other cities for the past three days since the election results were announced. Reports are that they are the biggest in a decade if not since the Islamic Revolution in Iran...

Iran closes Al Arabiya's offices in Tehran

2009-06-14T07:38:00.002-04:00

Iran closes Al Arabiya's offices in Tehran
DUBAI (Courtney C. Radsch)

Iranian authorities closed down Al Arabiya's Tehran bureau Sunday afternoon amid heightened tensions in the violent aftermath of a disputed election victory by incumbent Mahmoud Ahmedinijad over leading reformist rival Mir Hossein Mousavi.

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Election report: Lebanon heads to the polls for historic election

2009-06-07T13:11:00.002-04:00

The cars struggled to pass each other in the long line of cars maneuvering on the narrow mountain road into the village of Mechan to the school that served as its polling station.

Jeeps filled with veiled women and bearded men pulled up to unload their passengers, ferried by bus from their homes in Syria to vote for Hezbollah in an historic election that drew an estimated 10 percent of voters from abroad to vote in the parliamentary elections.

A sheikh in white headdress was the first to arrive, and every few minutes another carload arrived to drop off some 200 voters who had made the five-hour trek to dip their fingers in purple ink and cast their ballots.

Mechan gets to elect three representatives: one Christian and two Shias. Lebanon’s democratic system requires a rigid adherence to parliamentary representation based on sectarian allocations to each of the country’s 18 religious factions. Muslims get 64 seats and Christians the other half of the 128 seats in parliament.

“We came to have our voices heard,” Mohamed Chamas told Al Arabiya, explaining why he had travelled from Syria to cast his vote in his hometown.

Lebanese must vote for one of the 580 candiates in one of 26 districts, which is determined by the hometown of their father or husband’s family as recorded on their identity cards, regardless of where they live. 580 candidates were running

Several youth in dressed in the bright red shirts of government supports stood just above the village school where people lined up for an hour to cast their vote while others dressed in yellow vest emblazoned with the green machine gun logo of Hezbollah stood watch across the street.

A cacophony of car horns attested to the passion of a society split between a Western-backed government loyal to former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri’s Future movement and that of the Syrian and Iranian-backed opposition loyal to Christian General Michel Aoun and the Shiite party Hezbollah.

Cars draped in the red, white and green of the March 14 movement – which included Saad Hariri’s Future movement and Samer Geagea’s Lebanese Forces and Amin Gameyel’s Phalangists -- and tooted a distinctive honk while those draped in the orange of Aoun or the yellow and green of Hassan Nasrallah’s Hezbollah totted another theme.

The honks echoed through the empty streets, where shuttered stores and restaurants attested to the heightened tensions of a body politic concerned about clashes between rivals.

The army was out in full force as tanks, strategically positioned at polling stations and throughout the cities, and soldiers in fatigues bearing rifles and machine funs kept a wary eye on residents they hoped would be dissuaded from causing any trouble.

Nearly 3.5 million people were expected to vote Sunday, with 10 percent of them returning from abroad to fulfill their civic duty. With an estimated population of about five million, their impact could be critical.

The authorities have suggested that some 16 million Lebanses citizens abroad will be able to vote through their embassies in the next election, but for the 2009 election they would have to travel back to a homeland that has been struggling to recover from a 20-year civil war that ended in 1991 and a 2006 Israeli war that decimated much of its recovery efforts.

European Union election observers were in Lebanon to monitor and assess the integrity of the elections, but even before election day their were reports of cheating and fraud.

One observer stationed in Byblos, the port city 35 km ( miles) north of Beirut, told Al Arabiya that fake identity cards that were exact duplicates of the real ones required to vote were found in Beirut, xxx and xxx.

In the days leading up to election day the various parties distributed ballots to the faithful isting the slate of candidates they supported. In Batroun, a beachside city in the north of Lebanon home to a mix of Shia and Christian residents, ballots with disappearing ink were found, adding to the controversy over tactics used by the government-aligned forces to swing the election in their favor.

A week ago a new March 14 candidate named Gibran Bassil entered the race. But there was already a Gibran Bassil running with the March 8 opposition. The pro-government alliance hoped the confusion created by having two candidates with the same name would work in their favor, forcing the more well-know opposition candidate to be forced to use a third name as an identifier and thus invalidating ballots that did not distinguish the two.

But the day before the election the authorities, looking to French law for guidance, ruled that the lesser-known candidate would be the only one required to use a third name – his father’s—and thus backfiring.

As the polls closed at 7 p.m., Michel Aoun’s supporters in were erecting a stage in the historic downtown area in preparation for what they hoped would be a victory celebration.

In the 2005 elections the March 14th alliance gained 71 seats while the opposition won 57.

Obama gives Americans blueprint for Muslim ties

2009-06-05T01:17:00.001-04:00

Americans, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, listened with interest to their presidentâs address to the Muslim world Thursday in Cairo in which he reiterated the need for mutual interest and respect between the United States and Muslims that has been a theme throughout his young presidency.

Read my article for Al Arabiya Obama gives Americans blueprint for Muslim ties for more.

News | Egypt's Grand Mufti bans Muslim use of WMDs

2009-06-02T14:45:00.001-04:00

News | Egypt's Grand Mufti bans Muslim use of WMDs

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Variety News | Former terror detainee stars in Gitmo Xbox game

2009-06-01T16:04:00.002-04:00

Variety News | Former terror detainee stars in Gitmo Xbox game

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Why the Der Spiegal Hezbollah article was a legitimate news story

2009-05-26T15:52:00.006-04:00

There has been quite an uproar in the Arabic, and particularly Lebanese, media over the Der Spiegal story linking Hezbollah to the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Al Arabiya has come under particularly fierce attack from pro-Hezbollah media, especially of course Al Manar, as well as NBN and other sympathetic media. But they seem to miss the point -- they attack Al Arabiya for reporting on the Der Spiegel article without assessing its inherent news value and recognizing that this was a story across the world and not part of some pro-Hariri or pro-March 14 agenda. All major news organizations across the world covered the story, from news agencies like AP to Al Jazeera and CNN. And of course Al Arabiya (and here's the arabic one).

The Der Spiegel article was published less than three weeks ahead of the June 7 parliamentary elections pitting the Western-backed Sunni-led March 14 coalition against the Syria and Iran-backed Shia-Christian alliance known as March 8 led by Hezbollah. And we were clear to point this timing out as were so many others.

The article relied on unnamed and unidentified "sources" in the United Nations Special Tribunal that reportedly told the German magazine that the tribunal has evidence linking special forces in the Hezbollah to the bombing that killed Hariri and 19 others. It cites information obtained from unspecified source "and verified by examining internal documents" and claims that the special prosecutor is afraid of Hezbollah and therefore has not made the information public. And Al Arabiya noted this. But just because there are unamed sources doesn't make an article unquoteable. It is certianly not ideal and should be clearly stated. But when I think to my time at the New York Times and the types of stories that got published without naming sources - think Abu Ghraib, illegal wiretapping etc -- it can sometimes be necessary. And the stories the NYT broke on these subjects as well as recent ones about US strikes in Pakistan were considered newsworthy as well and were covered by all professional media.

Of course there are also stories such as those in the lead-up to the Iraq war that used unamed sources and were wrong. That is why the journalist has a responsibility to make clear that the story is from an unamed source and thus must be treated with a certain amount of skepticism. But when respected news organization write reports they become legitimate story sources for other journalists. It doesn't mean there is a political agenda behind it. And as the head of Al Arabiya told us today, we must cover the news regardless of the politics - if the report was that Saad Hariri assassinated his own father this too would be news and we would have reported it. And the Arabic chanel and Arabic & English sites have done several follow up stories on Hassan Nasrallah's denial, accusations that Israel was behind the story, accusations the story was published to create clashes between Sunnis and Shias, and of course the timing of the Der Spiegel article.

Sr Hamas leader Hamdan urges coexistence between Jews, Arabs under Palestinian rule

2009-05-21T04:49:00.002-04:00

Yesterday Hamas senior leader Osama Hamdan sat with me and my colleagues at Al Arabiya in the wake of unsuccessful talks with Fatah and the formation of a new Palestinian government to discuss Hamas' position on a range of issues, from the Egytpian-mediated talks with Fatah to its relations with Hezbollah and Iran to its role in Egypt.

Ayman Taha, a Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, was also present but didn't speak (though he yawned a few times!). Hamdan was quite polite, and he understands English though he preferred to speak in Arabic. At the end of the session he explained that he does not shake hands with women and means no offense by it. "Ma feesh mushkillah" I told him (no problem), since of course I am accustomed to this practice having lived in several Muslim countries. My colleagues found this funny, though, and one of them teased that he was going to put the handshake in the headline.

Hamas usually reaches out to Al Jazeera, as some perceive that Al Arabiya is not on its "side." But the fact is that Al Arabiya is a respected news station that is doing professional work in a region that until these two satellite stations came on the scene was dominated by ideological and state-owned media. So perhaps I was less surprised than some of my Arab friends that he came to talk to the so-called "CNN" of the Arab World.

We sat in the fourth floor conference room just outside the studio and near the new AlArabiya.net offices. We spoke for about 45 minutes, well, mainly he spoke.

He said progress had been made in the talks with rival Palestinian faction Fatah but only because of Hamas' compromises. Hamdan urged the peaceful co-existence of Jews and Arabs, but stressed it must be under Palestinian rule."There is a Jewish community that lived for centuries in Nablus and remains to this day unharmed and has not been expatriated,” he said.

You can read the article I wrote here for the full story.

Egypt's Facebook activists 'day of anger' fizzles

2009-04-06T16:16:00.003-04:00

Egyptian security forces arrested several protesters and contained small demonstrations in Cairo Monday during a 'day of anger' organized on Facebook by April 6 youth that largely fizzeled out according to observers.

Dozens of activists, students and members of the banned Islamist group the Muslim Brotherhood were arrested, though there were no reports of mass arrests. A police crackdown over the weekend resulted in at least 30 arrests, according to the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information.

The demonstrations came on the one year anniversary of a nationwide strike organized by activists on Facebook and blogs in conjunction with factory workers in the Nile Delta city of Mahalla.

Day of anger

Protesters held small protests throughout Cairo despite heavy police presence. A few hundred people gathered at the Press Syndicate while hundreds of protesters gathered at Cairo, Ain Shams and Helwan Universities, according to Twitter updates from activists.

Activists used Twitter, which allows users to send out short messages called tweets via mobile phones to their followers and their blogs, and blogs to publicize the detentions and arrests of fellow protesters and keep tabs on police activity.

“The security forces have been making some random arrests from Kifaya and the April Sixth movement, going on a rampage against all the people who are making this,” one of the organizers of the Facebook group, Abdallah Elshamy, told AlArabiya.net.

	The security forces have been making some random arrests from Kifaya and the April Sixth movement
Abdallah al-Shamy, Facebook group

Parliament members affiliated with the banned Islamist Muslim Brotherhood staged a solidarity walk out. The Muslim Brotherhood had called for people to peacefully take part in the 'day of anger' but did not organize its members to participate.

Ayman Nour, the head of the Ghad party and democracy activist who was freed from prison last month, spoke at a rally surrounded by police where he demanded a new Egyptian constitution, a system of checks and balances and the end to emergency law.

"If (the demands) are unheeded by April 6, 2010 we will prepare for a general strike in all of Egypt," he said.

April 6 movement

The April Sixth movement formed after a year of worker protests culminated in clashes between security forces and workers in the Nile Delta town of Mahalla on April 6 last year, killing three people, including a child, and injuring more than 150.

Organizers called on participants to wear black and protest at work and school and the Facebook page had more than 75,600 members as of Monday morning.

They want the government to raise the minimum wage from 167 Egyptian pounds ($29) to 1,200 Egyptian pounds ($213) a month and elect a body to draft a new constitution.

	This year the April Sixth movement didn’t succeed in gathering all angry people behind them
Khalil al-Anani, al-Ahram Center

Only a virtual movement

The April Sixth Youth use the social networking site Facebook and the along with a forum for criticism of a government in power for more than a quarter century and to push for political and economic right.

But some analysts say that because the movement is a virtual one, without any real organization or set of demands, it cannot build the trust needed to create a coalition among disparate groups to demand real change.

“The movement is still a movement not more than this, so it’s difficult to make political or social change,” al-Ahram Center analyst Khalil al-Anani told AlArabiya.net.

“This year the April Sixth movement didn’t succeed in gathering all angry people behind them; if they would do this they would of course succeed in their strike today,” he added.

Unlike last year, when the virtual movement linked with the Mahalla factory strikers, the movement this year did not get the support of any other strikers or unions such as doctors or truck drivers, who have planned strikes in recent days, said al-Anani.

(written for AlArabiya.net)

Expats like UAE but may leave next year: poll

2009-03-03T15:30:00.001-05:00

Even as expatriates in the United Arab Emirates are losing their jobs and considering leaving in the next year, the majority considers the emirate better than other countries they could live in and a significant number are considering starting their own businesses, according to a survey released Tuesday.

With fears about job security and dissatisfaction with the high cost of living prompting four in ten expats to consider leaving, 34 percent are considering staying and starting their own business, the survey by Dubai-based Real Opinions found.“One of the issues is there’s a lot of uncertainty in the marketplace and of course with uncertainty people look at possible alternatives instead of just waiting for fate to take its course,” Dan Healy, CEO of Real Opinions, told AlArabiya.net.

In terms of job security, eight percent of respondents said they had already lost their jobs and 17 percent felt they would most likely lose their job or be made redundant over the coming 12 months. Add to this the extremely high costs of living, especially in Dubai where many financial and property firms are located, and it becomes clear why people think about leaving. Seventy-five percent of respondents said they were dissatisfied with the overall cost of living, though according to the 2008 Mercer Cost of Living Survey neither Dubai or Abu Dhabi appeared in the top 50 most expensive cities, with most European capitals and New York outranking them.

Entrepreneurial spirit

But expats do not want to leave the year-round sunny emirate that boasts a relatively high standard of living, said Healy, citing the 58 percent of respondents who said they considered living in the UAE better than other countries. The survey included people from a cross-section of monthly incomes ranging below AED 10,000 ($2775) to more than AED 30,000 ($8333).

An alternative to leaving could be to start up one’s own business, a move 11 percent said they had already made and another 34 percent considering do so within the next year. “There are challenges and opportunities for UAE authorities to make the most of these results,” said Healy, suggesting that the inability of employers to adapt to the economic situation has prompted employees to take up the challenge themselves by setting up their own companies in a country without corporate and income taxes.

The representative online survey of 450 foreigners working or recently employed in the UAE was conducted just prior to what Healy called a “timely intervention” by the UAE federal government's central bank, which purchased a $10 billion bond issued by the government of Dubai under a $20 billion program. Healy said the survey, a preliminary look at the expats in the UAE, indicated that many of those looking to leave are highly skilled and were weighing other options. Further research on who these expats are, what industries they work in and their level of personal debt would need to be done to determine whether there is a brain-drain and which industries might see more businesses.

Better opportunities

But many expats were lured to the UAE by more than just high salaries and standard of living; the UAE offered many expats career opportunities not available to them in their home countries given experience and education levels. Amy Lewia, a 24-year-old American just out of architecture school, lost her job in Dubai and was ready to reluctantly head back to New York when she received a call about a job in Abu Dhabi Tuesday.“I was too sad to leave the country because I couldn’t find anything,” she told AlArabiya.net. “The work experience is like none other I could get at home for my experience level, the work is above what I would be getting for someone my age in the states.”And, she noted, there do not seem to be many jobs in the U.S. either.

Meditations on journalism, cyberactivism and my research

2009-02-15T16:27:00.007-05:00

Covering the kidnapping - what we in the media called arrest - of Philip Rizk, an AUC student, blogger, freelance journalist, documentary filmmaker and Gaza activist was an interesting opportunity to see whether the mechanisms and processes I've identified in my research on cyberactivism actually exist, and to trace how and why my research findings may or may not play out in real life. In fact, being inside the Arab media is a interesting ethnographic exercise of participant observation - seeing how my news organization, journalists and editorial decisions play out in relation to the efforts exerted by activist networks. OK, so what do I mean.

Basically, last week Philip Rizk (whom I know from Cairo) was spirited away by the Egyptian police after he was 'detained' on his way back from a solidarity march for Gaza. As Sarah Carr, a Daily News journalist and blogger who frequents the same circles as several of Egypt's activist bloggers, reported he was surreptitiously taken from the police station right from under his lawyers noses and kept incommunicado for nearly six days until he was released. But why was he let out but another blogger, who was not a dual citizen of a Western country, and 70 Muslim Brotherhood activists also jailed for demonstrating in support of Gaza, not released and their stories nearly absent from the Western and even Arab media? The reason is because of the very cyberactivism I have been researching and writing about for the past few years, and which has by now become a well-oiled, sophisticated process of contention that involves activist networks using new media like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs and websites to harness the power of old media like the New York Times, Reuters and AFP to put the pressure of the spotlight on the Egyptian government, activate human rights advocates at international pressure groups like Amnesty and Reporters Without Borders and compel Western governments to make a statement.

I found out about Philip's arrest on Facebook on Sunday, when Sarah Carr updated her Facebook status to read Philip Rizk arrested. A few hours later the story came in on the AFP wire. By then there was a Facebook group, which included an Amnesty letter writing campaign, shortly thereafter friends set up a website in English AND Arabic devoted to his release (Free Philip Rizk) was set up and several activist bloggers had written about Rizk's arrest.

The Facebook updates and the group started by Rizk's family provided journalists with the latest information about hm and the tribulations of his family (whose house was broken into by police) and support of lawyers etc. Twitter messages from activist bloggers gave followers the latest updates. The blogger activists who gained so much experience organizing Campaigns to free others in their ranks over the past four years had the process down to a science, activated their networks within hours, and effectively managed to broadcast their message to the international media, amplifying their voices and strengthening their ability to put pressure on the Egyptian government.

By Monday the New York Times' Michael Slackman in Cairo had picked up the story along with other leading newspapers and media outlets like Democracy Now picked up his story. Hardly any media, with the exception of my reports for Al Arabiya mentioned the other arrests (as Gamal Eid explained to me, Muslim Brotherhood arrests are a normal occurrence and therefore not news - but I would add that they don't speak English or have the same access to journalistic networks that their activist counterparts have).

Philip Rizk has been freed, but only because of the concerted effort made by activists and journalists on his behalf. Other Gaza activists remain in jail. They are not dual citizens, they have not had a worldwide campaign reaching out to the media on their behalf. That's why I wrote my coverage of the whole situation the way I did.

Celebrating Obama's inauguration in Dubai

2009-01-20T23:20:00.002-05:00

I attended the Democrats Abroad inaugural viewing at the Dubai Marina Yacht Club where hundreds of people gathered to watch Obama’s swearing-in ceremony and listen to his speech at an event hosted by Democrats Abroad, the international arm of the Democratic party.

" I want to be with Americans at this special time "

Jack Carter

“Americans want to feel connected to Americans tonight,” explained Chris Hansen, chair of Democrats Abroad UAE, adding that there were also several expatriates married to Americans and some locals in attendance. “The whole world is excited.”

Former President Jimmy Carter’s son, Jake Carter, in town for business was among the crowd cheering on the new president as he swore to uphold the constitution.

“I want to be with Americans at this special time,” he told me, noting that he came to Dubai a day earlier than planned to watch the event with his fellow Democrats.

About 200 people watched the ceremony live via CNN on a huge screen, cheering when Obama took his oath using his full name, Barack Hussein Obama, and booing whenever the camera panned to show former president George W. Bush.

Kojo Dufu, a black American from New York who moved to Dubai just eight weeks ago managed to find out about the inaugural event for expats and told me he would be throwing a “Bush Be-Gone after party.”

“America is reborn, we need irrational exuberance!” he said.

In his speech Obama referred to the need to revise American energy policy in an indirect reference to Middle East policy and said he hoped to improve relations with the Muslim world.

" I feel comfortable with what he said about the Muslim world "

Shoueb Rifani

For Arab-American Shoueb Rifai Obama's first speech as president gave him the opprtunity to see a preview of what the president's agenda might look like in the region.

"I want to see some hints of his foreign policy," he explained. "I feel comfortable with what he said about the Muslim world; I'm optimistic."

" America is reborn, we need irrational exuberance "

Kojo Dufu

Grace Amondi and Judy Njuki were particularly excited about Obama’s inauguration because as Kenyans they felt a particular affinity to him because “he’s half Kenyan.”

Obama’s father was born in Amondi’s hometown Kogelo and went to school with her father, she told me, explaining that she took the day off of work and sought out a place to watch the speech. “We have to be here, it’s history!”

“We’re really proud of him,” added Njuki.

African-American Sarah Peoplesperry, who moved to Dubai from Virginia five months ago, participated in the march on Washington led by Martin Luther King and heard him predict there would be a black president in 25 years.

“It is awesome to see it in my lifetime,” she told me. “It’s a historic event.”

“It’s a joy to be with other Americans and Democrats who believe in the same mission of Barack Obama,” she said, explaining why she came to the event.

" It’s a joy to be with other Americans and Democrats who believe in the same mission of Barack Obama "

Sarah Peoplesperry

The inauguration was the largest ever, with estimates of two to three million people attending the ceremony in Washington, D.C. and countless millions tuned to their televisions and computers around the world.

“The most stressful thing was managing the amount of people,” said Liz Katkin, vice chair of Democrats Abroad UAE, told me. “There’s so much excitement about Obama. Every event in the world is sold out!”

She said they had hoped for 100 to 150 responses and were overwhelmed when they got 300 RSVPs and had to turn people away.

Dubai: First Impressions of a New Transplant

2008-08-31T02:42:00.001-04:00

I've moved to Dubai to start a new job with Al Arabiya and have recorded a few of my first impressions, from my incredulity at the amount of construction underway to the palatable feeling of segregation that permeates this new city-state I will be calling home.

I arrived in Dubai Thursday as the sun rose over the Arabian Gulf (as the Persian Gulf is known here) casting a florescent gold hue over the still waters interspersed with odd formations of man-made island. The airport was super modern and I had to do an iris-scan before going through passport control. Southeaast and East Asians and Africans dressed in bright red shirts with "May I help You?" emblazoned on their chests stood throughout the airport ready to offer the bewildered traveler assistance in English. Men in white flowing robes and headscarves intermingled with Indian women in colorful saris, Americans and Europeans in jeans and sun dresses, and Arabian women in bejeweled black hijabs in the most multicultural crowd I've ever been in.

As the taxi drove me from one side of the city to the other I got a brief taste of the city I'll be living in for the next year or so. Nearly every building boasted at least one crane, with new buildings springing up everywhere, like weeds. Skyscapers jut out of the dessert and into the smog in a surreal landscape of modernization and development at warp speed. Yet despite the astronomical amount of living space being created seemingly overnight there is apparently a dearth of available apartments for rent as I found out when I went apartment hunting yesterday afternoon. I figured I might as well hit the ground running so I made an appointment with a rental agent to see a few places. Similar to the New York real estate market, renters must go through agents to fine a place then pay 5% of the yearly rent in agency fees. But unlike New York, the renter has to pay the entire year's rent plus 5% security deposit plus 5% agency fees up front! For now my company is putting me up in an apartment hotel, which is surrounded by other - seemingly empty - residential skyscrapers and an inordinate amount of construction. Other than the construction what has impressed me most in my one day here is the friendliness and helpfulness of the people working in the service industry (with the exception of taxi drivers).

On my first day here I headed over the Mall of the Emirates, famous for it's indoor ski slopes. Now, I doubt those who have made it to Tahoe, Aspen or even Big Bear would bother to even take a spin, but to see Arab kids outfitted in poofy little snow suits for their tour down the "mountain" , their mothers clad in black abayas in tow, is quite a site. From my brief tour through one of the largest (the largest?) malls in the world I realized I need not have worried about shopping before I left the US. There are many of the same chains here and from what I can tell the prices are fairly comparable. I've never been much of a fan of malls but I suppose I'll have to learn to love them, as going to the mall is pretty much the main recreational activity from what I've heard so far. I suppose this is why people say it's hard to save in Dubai!

Yesterday I took a bus because I couldn’t find a taxi and figured why pay for a taxi when I could take the bus for 2 dirhams, or about 25 cents. I got in line and only after a few minutes did I realize that the women were queued separately from the men. After waiting outside of the air-conditioned bus (a nice, modern one, no micro-buses here) for the driver to finish his brake we were finally permitted to board, the women first followed by the men. How civilized! (Note: how different from the airport at Lebanon where the men pushed and shoved to get in front of women with children and babies in tow, now pre-boarding for them and no common courtesy). As I looked around I was once again struck by the segregation of this new society I am going to be living in. I was the only non-Asian or African. From the conversations around me I could tell that most of the women on the bus worked as maids or babysitters, most of the men appeared to be in construction.

One of the most striking things about Dubai, other than the construction, is the feeling of segregation that permeates every aspect of daily life. I feel like I am getting a taste of what it must have been like in the United States during the segregation era. Nearly all of those in the service industry here hail from Southeast Asia, East Asia and Africa, with a few Arabs thrown in for good mix. The friendly helpers at the Mall of the Emirates, the hotel staff, the shopkeepers, and the taxi drivers, none of them appear to be of European heritage. This is not to say that there are not people of these backgrounds shopping at the mall and driving the insanely expensive cars that line the valet parking lots. But as someone who grew up in the multicultural milieu of Southern California I am very cognizant of this racial disparity in the service industry and it makes me uncomfortable.

And sad. Yesterday the Khaleej Times reported that several Pakistani workers had died in a fire at a villa where they were living upwards of 20 to a room in conditions that were most likely illegal. But it was apparently the only way they could afford housing in this crazy economy.

Tomorrow I start work, the first day of Ramadan. I've never been in an Arab country during the holy month of Ramadan, in which people do not eat, drink or smoke during daylight hours. Here is Dubai it is illegal to even carry a bottle of water openly during the day. In one of the apartments I looked at yesterday a sign in the elevator announced that all vending machines would be turned off during the month of Ramadan. I cannot help but think of the fortitude and dedication to their faith of those who must work all day in the scalding dessert sun, building tower after tower without even a drink to quench their thirst. Ramadan Kareem.

Police and Security Out In Droves, Protesters Scarce, Arrests Throughout Egypt

2008-04-06T12:34:00.003-04:00

The media battle over whether today was a success is well underway even as demonstrators and activists continue to be rounded up, arrested, and harassed. Pictures can be seen here. I tried to take some in Tharir, Talat al Harb and Sharia Galaa but I admit I was intimidated. I was menacingly told to move along by an undercover when I paused, pretending to talk on the phone while trying to take a picture. Al Jazeera reported that it was not allowed to film in Cairo though they managed to sneak in a few pictures on the evening news. The NDP spokesman, Mr. Butros, pronounced the strike a failure (surprise surprise) as rumors of someone killed in Mahalla have begun circulating on Twitter. The strike there was aborted since police and undercover officers had managed to infiltrate the factory and intimidate workers, meaning that there were far fewer than the expected 20,000 protesters hoped for by organizers. Those that did try to strike were violently prevented from doing so. According to Reuters "Police escorted small groups of workers from the factory at the end of their shifts to stop them organizing and protesting" though the story does not mention that they also used tear gas, batons and arrests. Students at Ain Shams and Helwan Universities did hold demonstrations - with several arrested - though a friend reports that things were pretty calm at Cairo University. Meanwhile the Egyptian government has been hunting down organizers and activists, one of the more famous of which, Malek, remains in jail since yesterday for posting fliers about today's strike and another, Mohamed Al Sharkawy who was dragged from his home and is best known for being the victim of sodomy and torture at the hands of Egyptian police.

My morning began early today when I went down to the Lawyers Syndicate and found the streets already lined with gangs of plain clothes police and row upon row of police in riot gear. Making my way through the rows of police into the syndicate was admittedly a daunting act and I admit I held my breath. Inside was packed already by 10 a.m., perhaps because it was one of the few places where people were allowed to make a demonstration (though it did not get going until later). I made my way to Tharir, passing by a few other syndicates on the way, all of which were hemmed in by police. There was hardly any traffic and the police presence (not to mention the huddles of thugs standing nearby) was enough to keep me in my taxi. Few people were in the streets near Tharir at that time. Back in Zamalek there was a noticeable lack of traffic. The neighborhood store where I often buy tamiyya from told me that there would be none today because of the strike - they hadn't gotten their shipment apparently, although they were open for business. Several shops were shuttered, though this may be because it is Sunday rather than because of the strike according to my bowab. At noon I went back to Tharir and found that thought there were more people on the streets and businesses were open the haunting weather brought on by the hamseen sandstorm seemed to reflect the surreal feeling of anticipation that hung over the area. The American University of Cairo (AUC) was open and had refused calls by some professors to cancel classes - nor did the authorities allow students to publicize the strike, not a flier was to be seen about the planned demonstrations - and had warned student to stay away from Tharir. This apparently did not deter some determined activists because around 12:30 reports of AUC students being arrested started to make their way through the blogosphere. Wael Abbas was mobile blogging and many others sent reports of what they saw and heard throughout the day, though many of them stayed home to avoid arrest, though I know it must have been difficult for some not to be able to be in the thick of things. Kifaya called off the demonstration planned for Tharir because of the insane police presence but people continued to get arrested throughout the day, mothers, students, workers, activists, you name it.

As I walked up Talaat al Harb I must have passed more than 100 policemen. On each corner 3 rows of 10 policemen stood facing out at the street with several more senior officers milling around, intimidating shop owners and passerbys. And of course plain clothes thugs were too. A tourist couple from the UK reported that their hotel had told them about the strike and did not seem too concerned about the police presence. Some shops were locked and shuttered but the restaurants, travel agencies and bookstores were open for business. By 5:30pm many of the police seemed to have left, confident in their knowledge that they had deterred the would-be protesters. Whereas usually my ride home would take forever at this time, the streets were definitely emptier than usual. I don't know how many people stayed home or how this can be known. And as April 6 officially draws to a close the battle to define success and failure, winner and loser begins.

Both sides realize that part of the battle must be fought on the airwaves. I'm sure this is why Egyptian state security reportedly arrested a BBC Arabic correspondent and prohibited Al Jazeera from filming. Supporters of the strike and government representatives have taken to the satellite channels and blogosphere (ok, the later is definitely dominated by the former!). Supporters created a blog and publicized some phone numbers where people could post their observations and experiences of the strike and to track arrests, abuses, etc. While I saw Al Masry Al Yaom on the stands today (with a prominent headline about the strike) there was no sign of Al Destor, at least in Tharir. Sandmonkey reports that "

"The cover of government mouthpieces AlAhram and Al Akhbar are filled with headlines that both deny the existance of any strike , following the line of "What strike? That's just a bunch of hype started by a number of illegal and shady movements and individuals who want to ruin the country!", and yet detail the amounts of legal punishment and trouble that anyone who participates in a strike would receive "Losing your job, Fines, 3 months to a year in prison, being on the government's shit list forever, etc..etc..". Uber government presswhore RoseAlYusef published a headline asking people to calm down, go to work and not worry because everything is working fine and there is no strike , and life is rosy. In Rosealyusef's world, reality is what you make it, which must work really well for them.

I think it will be difficult to assign success or failure since there seemed to be so many different objectives by so many different political actors - some called for workers to strike, some called for people to stay home out of protest while others (like Kifaya) called for them to take to the streets. And the message went from one about the rising cost of bread, inflation and wages to one about political repression, political change and other amorphous and less specific demands that made if difficult for people to rally around and certainly provoked the government. What was clearly demonstrated today, however, is that indeed Egypt remains a police state and the government is very skilled at intimidation. And as one blogger pointed out to me today, the U.S. government helps to fund this by giving millions of dollars to the Egyptian military and enabling Mubarak's government (OK, well he said regime) to do what it likes with impunity. Today, like many days before, demonstrated the desire by people of all social classes and walks of life to do something to improve their lot in life and the system in which they live. Must people take to the streets and risk life, limb and livelihood to get this?

The streets are full of police, empy of activists

2008-04-06T04:58:00.004-04:00

It's 11 a.m. I drove around the city center to see what was going on. Droves of police line the streets in front of the Lawyer, Journalist and Workers Syndicates not to mention Tharir, where they are already standing ready in their riot gear, shields and batons ready to go. There are also lots of people in the streets - but they're going to work, going on with their daily business, not demonstrating, protesting or staying home out of solidarity. Now granted, it's only 11 a.m. the day is still young. Let's see how this thing shapes up...

UPDATE - noon: There seem to be far fewer cares on the streets of Zamalek...