Asma Mahfouz is the woman who started it all. You might even say that it is she who was actually responsible for the downfall of President Hosni Mubarak’s repressive regime in Egypt
And you might even say that the 26-year-old Ms. Mahfouz was responsible for the domino-like effect the revolution in Egypt has had across other repressive, authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa.
Ms. Mahfouz is one of the founders of the April 6 Youth Movement, a group of young, Internet-savvy activists. One of the things she did was to put up a video on Facebook challenging the manhood of the men of Egypt as she invited them to Tahrir Square and called for a right to live with dignity. She also used Facebook and Twitter for organizing and disseminating messages.
As expected, governments in countries where the masses are protesting will not take protests lying down. They have been systematically shutting down Internet access even as they shut down mobile-phone networks. But the young and the Internet-savvy are not easily squashed. To get around government shutdowns, dissidents have used makeshift antennae to link their computers and handsets to more orthodox transmission equipment in neighboring countries.
Technologies that transmit data under the noses of repressive authorities in this way are spreading like wildfire among pro-democracy groups, says Jeff Moss, a communications adviser to America’s Department of Homeland Security. He was cited by The Economist. For example, after Egypt switched off its Internet in January some activists brought laptops to places like Tahrir Square in Cairo to collect, via short-range wireless links, demonstrators’ video recordings and other electronic messages. These activists then broadcast the material to the outside world using range-extending antennae.
Tactical Tech, a British organization, teaches communication techniques to dissidents in five countries in the Middle East. According to its operatives, such antennae can even foil government eavesdropping and jamming efforts.
There are creative ideas to circumvent cyber-attacks. One of these, is to redesign apparently innocent domestic equipment. Kenneth Geers, an American naval-intelligence analyst at a NATO cyberwar unit in Tallinn, Estonia, describes a curious microwave oven. Though still able to cook food, its microwaves (essentially, short radiowaves) are modulated to encode information as though it were a normal radio transmitter. Thus, the original microwave oven which was based on the magnetron from a military radar has come a full circle.
Governments in the MENA region are getting increasingly suspicious about their citizens’ activities online. In Egypt, April 10. a blogger, Mikael Sanad Nabil, was sentenced to three years in prison for "insulting the military" in his blog postings, after a brief trial by a military court with no defence lawyers present.
According to an article in The Economist, two months after anti-government protests began in Bahrain, bloggers have been caught up in a sweeping crackdown in which at least 450 people have been arrested for being "political activists." Zakariya Rashid Hassan, who ran a online forum for residents of his village, Al Dair, died in custody last week, six days after being arrested for "spreading false news." His forum has been taken down and replaced with a picture of the Saudi and Bahraini kings. Human-rights groups allege he was tortured; the authorities say his death was due to anaemia.
The Paris-based lobbying group, Reporters Without Borders, says three other "netizens" remain in custody in Bahrain. At least three other bloggers have been arrested, including two men who campaign against sectarianism, Mahmood Al Yousif and @redbelt, the founder of #uniteBH, an online campaign.
A similar movement has sprung up in Lebanon.
To those who claim that the Internet is alienating society and making people socially dysfunctional, the Middle East protesters say that the Internet is changing the world and its order. In fact, they say, the Internet may well be the information superhighway to global peace one day.