WikiLeaks Exposes New Egypt Docs Amid Protests. Will Anyone There See Them?

Jan. 28 2011

By ANDY GREENBERG

http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2011/01/28/wikileaks-drops-new-egypt-revelations-amid-protests-will-anyone-there-see-them/

As Egyptian police fire tear gas canisters and rubber bullets at protestors in Cairo, WikiLeaks has been firing back with a stream of new State Department cables that reveal human rights abuses and political arrests in the country. But it shouldn’t expect those document dumps to fuel the mass movement there: As of Wednesday evening, Egypt’s government had shut off all four of its major Internet service providers, (ISPs) essentially instituting a nationwide digital blackout.
Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, and Etisalat Misr have all been cut off from the Internet, according to telecom monitoring firm Renesys. Only one ISP, the Noor Group, remained connected. That’s left the tens of thousands of protestors in the country with few ways to communicate with the outside world, and specifically hamstrung their channel for distributing photos and video of the movement to topple the regime of president Hosni Mubarak.
The blackout means there’s little chance of anyone in Egypt seeing a new round of WikiLeaks’ secret State Department cables that the secret-spilling group has released and linked to on its Twitter feed, apparently specially timed to highlight the injustices of the Egyptian regime and America’s ties to it. Those cables reveal that “police brutality continues to be a pervasive, daily occurrence,” with police often hanging criminal suspects from their arms for days at a time, and that bloggers and journalists live in fear of arrest. One cable admits that under Mubarak’s rule, which has long received military and financial support from the U.S., “torture and police brutality in Egypt are endemic and widespread. The police use brutal methods mostly against common criminals to extract confessions, but also against demonstrators, certain political prisoners and unfortunate bystanders.”
Given the government’s total censorship of the Internet–a move only precedented by Myanmar’s digital blackout during protests there in 2007–WikiLeaks doesn’t have much hope of immediately affecting events in Egypt, as many, including New York Times editor in chief Bill Keller, believe it did in the protests earlier this month that ousted Tunisian ruler Ben Ali.
As WikiLeaks-watcher and Foreign Policy writer Evgeny Morozov told me last week, WikiLeaks has always been more effective in inspiring change in liberal democratic regimes than in those willing to shut out its messages. “It’s kind of a paradox, because WikiLeaks does have the ability to embarrass governments, but it’s only the democratic ones,” Morozov said. “They’re the ones that can still feel embarrassed, and the ones that can’t censor WikiLeaks.”
So the real target of WikiLeaks’ releases, as usual, may be the U.S. One release has the prime minister of Qatar telling Senator John Kerry that Egyptians largely blame America for their political problems. Another notes that “thousands” of Egyptian military officers have been trained in America. As Egypt cuts itself off from the world, those messages may yet mean something for the Americans who can read them–and for the government that’s tacitly backed Egypt’s abuses.