How a Band of Geeks Survived a Lynch Mob Assault in Egypt [Egypt]

For three days, geeks, online activists, and D.I.Y. filmmakers protested peacefully in Tahrir Square . For three nights, they slept in tents with laptops and cellphones charged by hacked street lights. On the fourth day, the lynch mob came.

Thousands of folks supporting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak laid siege to the central plaza, pressing themselves into the four streets that lead into Tahrir. They attacked the unarmed, crowds with clubs, knives, stones and Molotov cocktails . As I write this, reports put the death toll at three with around 1,500 injured.

” This was a real battle, a real Egyptian street fight, but we kept them back with stones and barricades and fire,” computer security specialist Ahmad Gharbeia, 34, tells me over the phone. ” They never reached our camp.”

” I must preserve my phone battery,” he adds, ” so let’s talk later.”

For the past six years, Gharbeia has been training Arab world activists, journalists and human rights lawyers to hide their Internet communications from prying eyes. ” We use encryption techniques and PGP for email,” he says. ” We use proxies reminiscent of Tor that circumvent blocking. I was the Arabic editor of a tools set called Security in a Box. It’s a tool kit of open and free software that helps advocates and human rights activists achieve security, privacy and anonymity.”

The night before the siege, I interviewed him and his friends at their makeshift base-camp, a mesh of tents and small fires to keep warm while the crowd compiled a media archive of footage from the first days of the anti-Mubarak revolt. Over the weekend, around 100 people died when police shot tear gas and bullets at close range into protesters, and drove vehicles into crowds on a nearby bridge.

” It was very violent and brutal against peaceful people that just seeking to cross the bridge… 17 people died right before my eyes,” says Ahmad Abdalla, a 32-year-old filmmaker. ” That has been motivating me to gather the complete footage possible. We have now three computers, Mac, Linux, PC, so we’ll have the ability to handle everything. Cameras, cell phones, anything.”

Abdalla’s latest project, Microphone, a film on Alexandria’s underground music scene, was released the day the protests started. ” The cinemas closed, so not a lot of people have seen it,” he said. ” But I don’t care, what’s happening this is more important than any film.”

For days, the crew could only collect photos and video, without distributing what they shot. Last Friday, the govt. shut down Internet access , and was only restored on Wednesday . In two days they’ve compiled more than 100 gigabytes of pictures and pictures.

” The role of the net was critical firstly,” Gharbeia says. ” On the 25th, the movements of the protesting groups were arranged in real time through Twitter. Everyone knew were everyone else was walking and we could advise on the locations of blockades and skirmishes with police. It was real time navigation during the city, and that’s why it was shut down.”

While the web was cut, however, the groups made due by watching Al Jazeera. The protesters projected videos from the Qatar-based news channel last night – and passed along any news via landline or cellular phone (after they were working).

Dissidents working under other oppressive regimes are used to navigating censorship. In Egypt, it’s not a finely honed skill in Egypt, says Gharbeia’s brother Amr (pictured, above). He works on Internet security with Amnesty International in London. Before this week, the web was almost completely open so there was no use to have those skills. The loss of one of these basic tool enraged the tech crowd.

” Blocking the web was one of several biggest mistakes [the govt.] has made, plus cutting off cell phones,” said a former official inside the ministry of communications who now works for a big computer company. ” That made the folk very angry and more aggressive.”

Small pockets of Internet access, however, did exist at certain times. Egyptian authorities allowed small ISP Noor to operate until Monday morning. Le Monde reported that the govt. will have allowed Noor to continue as a result of its high-profile client list, including the Egyptian stock exchange, the economic International Bank of Egypt, the National Bank of Egypt and Egypt Air.

One of the protesters used Noor in addition, so before Monday those at the protests would text or call the house with the connection, where half a dozen people uploaded the knowledge to blogs and Facebook.

Mubarak’s mob didn’t break the Tahrir protesters resolve on Wednesday, and the Egyptian leader’s incitement of violence will likely backfire against the 30-year regime. The crew, with their laptops in their tents, now surrounded by makeshift barricades, say they aren’t going anywhere.

” The running joke,” Amr says, ” is that the imminent Arab League summit will desire a lot of icebreakers because there will likely be so many new faces.”

Photos: Mike Elkin

Wired.com has been expanding the hive mind with technology, science and geek culture news since 1995.

Source

This post is tagged: computer security specialist, egyptian president hosni mubarak, encryption techniques, human rights activists, human rights lawyers, internet communications, president hosni mubarak