Geeks Rock the Arab Spring

A Geek Role in the Arab Spring
European Group Helps Tackle Regime Censorship
14 October, 2011 – By Ole Reissmann and Marcel Rosenbach – Der Spiegel

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A skinny young man with blue-dyed hair and boxy, horn-rimmed glasses sits in front of a laptop at a tiny desk in a shared apartment in Berlin’s bohemian Friedrichshain district. This is what the auxiliary forces of the Arab Spring look like, of the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere.

Stephan Urbach’s eyes are half closed. The 31-year-old complains about not getting enough sleep again as he takes a sip of Club Mate, a sweet and highly caffeinated soft drink that has become the beverage of choice for many activists working the night shift.

Until late last year, Urbach had a full-time position at AOL, the Internet service provider, where his job was to provide technical support to advertising customers around the globe.

In a way, he is still providing such support — though all of his “customers” now have names like Muhammad or Ahmad. And, unlike with his previous job, he gets a jolt of excitement every time their messages appear on his screen. He’s also relieved because every message he receives shows they can still go online and are not in prison or being tortured. Such has been the fate of many bloggers and digital dissidents — even in supposedly post-revolutionary countries, such as Egypt.

The Birth of an Online Movement

Urbach is wearing a black T-shirt with lightening bolts printed across it. This is the symbol of Telecomix, a loose network of international computer freaks that first emerged in Sweden. Their main goal is to make the Internet free and uncensored. Roughly three years back, the activists’ first project — and the one that determined their group’s name — was to influence Sweden’s implementation of European Union telecommunications legislation.

During the 2009 protest movement in Iran and the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia, Telecomix still mainly functioned as a group that gathered and disseminated information. The net activists posted links to the pages of dissidents and critical bloggers who dared to challenge the authoritarian regime in their respective country as well as the conformist state media by acting as citizen journalists.

But on Jan. 27 — the day the regime of then-President Hosni Mubarak took Egypt offline – Telecomix decided it should do more than simply act as a vehicle for enhancing the reach of critical voices.

Geeks to the Rescue

Egypt’s Internet blackout lasted several days. This helpless and desperate act showed that Egypt’s authoritarian rulers realized the threat posed by rebellious netizens and their medium. Likewise, it demonstrated that the regime was afraid of the way that social media could aid in broadcasting calls for mobilization as well as of the critical comments of many bloggers.

Mubarak’s technical counterattack shocked online activists and hackers around the world. For many, it was like a wake-up call for them to offer concrete assistance to those denied online freedoms. Since then, a very active movement has sprung up, and Telecomix is only one of a number of such collectives.

Activists at the anonymizing service Tor, for example, are holding workshops for Arab bloggers and, for years, they have been advising people on how to surf securely and send photos and videos abroad undetected. The hacker collective Anonymous also aims to focus more of its attacks on authoritarian countries in which protest movements are forming. …more