February 20, 2011
By NOAM COHEN
FOR a segment of the young people of Egypt, the date to remember is not when Egyptians first took to the streets to shake off the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak.
Rather, it is three days later — Jan. 28, 2011 — the day the Internet died, or more precisely, was put to sleep by the Mubarak government.
That was when some of them discovered a couple of polar but compatible truths. One, the streets still had the power to act as Twitter was unplugged. And two, the Internet had become so integral to society that it wasn’t unreasonable to consider a constitutional guarantee of free access to it.
“It felt exactly like going back in time, but in today’s world,” Ahmed Gabr, a medical student and the editor of the Swalif.net technology blog, wrote in an e-mail.
Mr. Gabr included his detailed timeline of interruptions in communications services during the protests: when service at Facebook and Twitter first became spotty, when text-messaging was interrupted.
His description for Jan. 28: “Egypt is now officially offline.”
In interviews by telephone and e-mail young Egyptians like Mr. Gabr — tech-savvy but not necessarily political — were hardly Internet utopians. They had, after all, seen firsthand how shutting down the Internet had failed to stop the momentum of the protests. But they did make a case that the Internet was an irreplaceable part of Egyptian life, especially for the young. Nothing more and nothing less.
The removal of the Internet by their government, they said, was a reminder that they were not free; not truly part of the wider world that they know so well thanks to technologies like the Web.
“Frankly, I didn’t participate in Jan. 25 protests, but the Web sites’ blockade and communications blackout on Jan. 28 was one of the main reasons I, and many others, were pushed to the streets,” wrote Ramez Mohamed, a 26-year-old computer science graduate who works in telecommunications.
“It was the first time for me to feel digitally disabled,” he wrote. “Imagine sitting at your home, having no single connection with the outer world. I took the decision, ‘this is nonsense, we are not sheep in their herd,’ I went down and joined the protests.”
For Mr. Mohamed, as for Mr. Gabr, it was like going back in time. “During the five days of the Internet blackout, I was at Tahrir Square for almost every day,” he recalled, referring to the hive of the Cairo protests. “Tell you what, I didn’t miss Twitter, I can confidently say that Tahrir was a street Twitter. Almost everyone sharing in a political discussion, trying to announce something or circulate news, even if they are rumors, simply retweets.”
Laughing at how what is old is new again, Mr. Mohamed ended this e-mail passage with a smilely face icon.The idea that the Egyptian government could simply shut down the Internet (something Libya now does periodically) was a shock to outsiders — even a bit of a technical achievement. And the decision to do it ran against the grain of what had been the government’s relatively open policy toward the Internet, said Andrew Bossone, who spent the past five years in Cairo writing about technology.
“When I went to Tunisia about a year ago, I couldn’t get onto YouTube or Al Jazeera,” Mr. Bossone said in an interview from Beirut, where he now lives. “Egypt didn’t really block any Web sites.”
He said the policy had raised expectations: “It’s not just about Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. It’s about access to this technology that everybody else has. A sense of entitlement. The idea that everybody else has it, why can’t I have it?”
Perhaps that sense of entitlement is behind the discussions that Mr. Gabr reported hearing. “Some friends are now even demanding, jokingly or seriously,” he wrote, “that a new or amended constitution should emphasize on a non-negotiable ‘right to Internet access’ for everybody.”
This comfort with a relatively free-flowing Internet was on display in 2008, when Wikipedia’s annual convention was held in Alexandria, at the new high-tech library built near where the legendary Library of Alexandria had been.
Filled with much of Egypt’s technical class, which included many women, the gathering was billed as an effort to bolster Arabic Wikipedia. The relatively low number of articles didn’t accurately reflect the importance of technology in the Arab world, the thinking went. Many Egyptians had an active, even bustling, Facebook presence, and attempts were made to organize protests at the site on behalf of bloggers who had been persecuted by the government.
Moushira Elamrawy, an advocate for free culture and free software in Alexandria, remembered the conference as a chance for the budding techie community in Egypt to meet in person. Two years later, the Internet shutdown showed the need for an independent community of technical experts to protect Egyptians’ connection to the world.
The day the Internet was shut off represented a point of no return, Ms. Elamrawy said. “It was definitely one of the most provoking things. We felt abandoned — completely isolated from the world.”
Ms. Elamrawy, who is 27 and trained as an architect but consults on development for free culture projects like Wikipedia, spoke by telephone from San Francisco, where she headed after spending the protests in Alexandria.
The protesters, she recalled, realized that in the time of darkness, it was particularly important to document what happened. They knew, she said, that at some point the Internet would be back, and people would want to know about the interim.
Ahmad Balal, a radiologist at Cairo University Hospitals who was a medical student during the Wikipedia conference in 2008, was one such chronicler. Mr. Balal wrote in an e-mail that his Facebook wall was the best way to relive what he experienced during the protests.
He had joined the protests at the start, on Jan. 25, but there is an eerie gap on his Facebook wall when the Internet was down, and friends from outside Egypt asked how he was but received no reply.
On Feb. 2, 5:18 a.m., when the Internet was back, he wrote in English, one of the few times he has: “The Internet is back to Egypt. Mr. Hosni Mubarak has offered it back to us after blocking it for only 5 days. Such a generous man!!!”
Forty-two minutes later, there appeared a photograph of a crowded Tahrir Square. The caption read, “I was there.”
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