Jared Cohen - The New Digital Age

Even if an opposition movement presents a credible blueprint, and contains genuine leaders with real skill, there are still a number of uncontrollable variables that could derail a revolution. Tribal, sectarian and ethnic tensions run deep in many societies and remain a minefield for even the most cautious operator to navigate. Internal and external spoilers, like terrorist groups, militias, insurgents and foreign forces, can disrupt the security situation. Many revolutions are spurred by bad economies or fiscal policies, so the slightest economic recalibration (for good or ill) might reverberate through the country and change protesters’ minds.

Then there is the dreaded expectations gap. Even if a revolution successfully “finishes,” with new players in power and public optimism at its highest point, few new governments will be able to match the expectations and desires of their populations. The consequence of popular uprisings involving many millions more people, thanks in large part to connectivity, is that even more of them will feel abruptly excluded from the political process when the revolution ends.

We saw this directly in Libya and Tunisia when we met with activists and government ministers; neither group felt satisfied or fully appreciated. Following the revolution in Egypt, so many people were unhappy with the way the military rulers, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), led the country after Mubarak that they subsequently re occupied Tahrir Square, the site of the original uprisings, several times. And when the population found itself with limited choices in Egypt’s first post-revolution presidential election—Ahmed Shafik, a symbol of the army, and Mohamed Morsi, a symbol of the Muslim Brotherhood—frustrations and the sense of exclusion only deepened. The degree to which people can feel involved now through connectivity will raise expectations as never before.

New governments will try to meet these demands for accountability and transparency by pursuing “open government” initiatives like publishing ministers’ daily schedules, engaging with citizens in online forums and keeping the lines of communication open where possible. Some citizens won’t be pacified by anything, however, and in them the ousted political elite will find its own online support network. Clever loyalists will make use of this expectations gap by staying connected to the population online and nurturing its grievances while they attempt to reconstitute the regime. Eventually, they might come to form the new online opposition movement.

Virtual Crackdowns and Containment

Faced with diffuse and omnipresent revolutionary threats, states will look for quick solutions for uprisings that bubble to the surface. They’ll have to get creative. Traditional methods like crackdowns and blackouts will become increasingly ineffective as connectivity spreads; the age-old autocratic strategy of suppressing rebellion by violence and rounding up ringleaders is much less relevant in the age of digital protests, online activism and real-time evidence dissemination. Historically, with a few notable exceptions (Tiananmen Square in 1989, the massacre in Hama, Syria, in 1982), crackdowns were rarely captured on film and it was very difficult for images and video to spread outside the country. If the regime controlled all the communications channels, the media and the borders, outside dissemination was nearly impossible.

As soon as mobile devices and the Internet became a feature of rebellion and mass protest, regimes adapted their strategy: They shut down the networks. Initially, this tactic seemed to work for several governments, most notably for the Iranian regime during the 2009 postelection protests when an almost complete shutdown quite effectively curtailed a growing opposition movement. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak had every reason to believe his virtual crackdown would put a stop to the revolutionary agitation in Tahrir Square less than two years later, but, as the story below illustrates, this strategy had already become counterproductive.

In the early hours of January 28, 2011, anticipating widespread antigovernment protests later that day, the Egyptian regime effectively shut down all Internet and mobile connections within the country. “Egypt Leaves the Internet” read the headline of one of the earliest blog posts on the event. 2It had blocked access to social-networking sites and BlackBerry Internet service a few days earlier, and with this move, the disconnection was complete. 3The country’s four main Internet service providers—Link Egypt, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr and Vodafone/Raya—were affected, and mobile-phone service was also suspended by all three telecom operators. The largest of the telecoms, Vodafone Egypt, issued a statement that morning that said, “All mobile operators in Egypt have been instructed to suspend services in selected areas. Under Egyptian legislation the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it.”

Given that the Egyptian government already controlled the few physical connections to the outside world—like the fiber-optic cables housed in one building in Cairo—the shutdown was a straightforward matter of closing these portals and contacting the big carriers and contractors with their demands. It was later revealed that the regime made it clear to companies like Vodafone that if they did not comply with the shutdown, the Egyptian government would, through its state-owned company Telecom Egypt, physically cut their service through the telecommunications infrastructure in the country (which would damage Vodafone’s ability to operate and take a considerable amount of time to undo). The ISPs and the telecom companies were caught completely off-guard—the government had long been a supporter of the expansion of the Internet and mobile services throughout Egypt—and therefore none had made contingency plans. It was a move unprecedented in recent history; other states had interfered with their population’s Internet services, but none had ever orchestrated such a coordinated and complete disconnection.

The move backfired. As a number of Egyptians and outside observers later noted, it was the shutting down of the network that truly electrified the protest movement because it brought so many more outraged people to the streets. Vodafone’s CEO, Vittorio Colao, concurred. “Hitting one hundred percent of the population on something that everyone thinks is essential, and actually taking it out, triggered a much more irritated and negative reaction than what the government expected,” he told us. Several Egyptian activists reiterated this, saying, in effect, I didn’t like Mubarak, but this wasn’t my fight. But then Mubarak took away my Internet and he made it my fight. So I went to Tahrir Square. This galvanizing act lent the movement a considerable momentum; had it not occurred, it’s possible that events in Egypt would have turned out very differently.

When the regime’s request to shut down the network came through, Colao said that Vodafone’s first move was to “make sure, from a legal point of view, that we were confronted with a legitimate request. It could be questionable, but it needed to be legal.” All telecommunications providers were required to have licensing contracts with the state, so once Vodafone determined that the request was legitimate, it had no choice: “We might not have liked the request, but not honoring it would be a breach of the law.”

Soon after, while Internet and mobile-phone service was suspended in Egypt, Vodafone faced another test: The government approached it and other operators in the country to send out its messages over the companies’ short-message-service (SMS) platform. This, Colao told us, was where Vodafone played a positive role. At first, he said, the government’s tone was procedural: Tonight there will be a curfew from six to nine. “This is one command you can do,” Colao explained. The second type of message was patriotic, saying something like, Let’s all be friends and love our nation—also fine, said Colao. “But at a point it became incredibly political and one-sided, and that is where you can’t ask the local Vodafone staff to say to their own government, We can’t comply with Egyptian law. We raised the issue with the Egyptian embassy, Hillary Clinton, and the U.K. government, and then Vodafone Group PLC”—the parent company—“put out a statement saying that we [would refuse the government request]. That’s what stopped the SMS messages. We were stopped for twenty-four hours for voice calls and four or five days for SMS. SMS is what they considered the threat.”