The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. This is both a practical and ethical belief. On a practical level, we simply cannot review all one hundred million-plus Tweets created and subsequently delivered every day. From an ethical perspective, almost every country in the world agrees that freedom of expression is a human right. Many countries also agree that freedom of expression carries with it responsibilities and has limits.

Our position on freedom of expression carries with it a mandate to protect our users’ right to speak freely and preserve their ability to contest having their private information revealed.

It was well-placed statement given that many news sources speculated on how Twitter’s service facilitated the Egyptian (and subsequent) protests; opportunistic, even, as Twitter wrapped itself in the banner of Free Speech and cried, “Sally forth, citizens of the world. Get your freedom on!”

Twitter stated earlier this week that they were branching into services for other languages such as Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew. On a date that is so significant for so many in the Middle East, it was hard not to conceptualize the timing of the announcement as a self-acknowledging wink at Twitter’s role, however major or minor, in the organization of protesters over the past year.

In a post on their official blog today, Twitter acknowledged that as they continue to move into culturally different regions of the world, some of what they can permit to be said through their service will be challenged by conflicting mores and tenets of freedom of expression. Given that, Twitter said today:

Until now, the only way we could take account of those countries’ limits was to remove content globally. Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why.

We haven’t yet used this ability, but if and when we are required to withhold a Tweet in a specific country, we will attempt to let the user know, and we will clearly mark when the content has been withheld.

So, if I’m understanding this correctly: someone in Egypt tweets something that violates a cultural or political restriction on free speech, so Twitter receives a request to remove it. Twitter now has self-applied the power to selectively remove the Tweet from view within Egypt, yet the rest of the world will still be able to read the tweet?

I really hope that’s what Twitter means by this news. Please let this be what this means, Twitter.

So what do you think about Twitter’s new elective powers for selectively censoring tweets where they violate freedom of expression laws but still make them available outside of that country? Anybody have any thoughts on what kind of implications people could see as a result of this new policy? Comment below with your thoughts.

On Feb 15th, CBS released a statement saying that Logan had been assaulted 4 days earlier while covering the celebrations of the regime change in Cairo. The hub of those celebrations was Tahrir Square, and it was filled with thousands of Egyptians that day. The CBS statement said:

In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers.

In her first TV interview since the event, Logan details the terrifying account of having her clothes ripped off my hundreds of men, and being beaten and “raped with their hands” repeatedly for 25 minutes. Logan confirms that a group of Egyptian women surrounded her and warded off the attackers long enough for Egyptian soldiers to finally come to her aid.

Check out the video below:

According to a new Reuters article, Sechin said, "Look what they have done in Egypt, those highly-placed managers of Google, what manipulations of the energy of the people took place there."

Assuming that quote’s completely accurate (and translation issues or some other small misunderstanding could come into play), Sechin’s drawn some interesting conclusions.  First, consider the words "they" and "managers," implying that Ghonim wasn’t acting alone.

Then there’s the term "manipulations" to consider, since it has some pretty unpleasant connotations.

This might cause more than a few problems for Google.  The Russian government isn’t known for tolerating rabble-rousers, and Google’s already had trouble competing with local search company Yandex.  Negative PR or a formal penalty of some sort wouldn’t help.

Sechin has a bit of evidence on his side, too.  The official Google Twitter account has at least twice tweeted in support of Ghonim, and Eric Schmidt’s also indicated a certain level of approval.

Ghonim is the company’s marketing manager in that region, and according to the WSJ had helped run social networks that included criticism of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.  

Toner said, "We have indeed received confirmation of his release."

This was further confirmed by a tweet from Ghonim’s Twitter account:

And by a tweet from Google:

Ghonim describes himself on Twitter as a constantly changing, serious joker, and Internet addict who loves challenging the status quo.

Creating Internet chaos.

Normally, the Anonymous group uses DDoS attacks to get their message across and with the Middle Eastern quagmire, it’s no different.  After recent attacks on the Tunisian government, the group turned their computing power towards Yemen and the “Day of Rage,” a civilian protest against the Yemeni government, similar to the unrest going on in Egypt.

During the “Day of Rage” protest, Anonymous launched a DDoS attack at the Yemeni Ministry of Information’s page and Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh.  They also directed their denial of service resources at President Mubarak’s page; although, it has returned to web. 

Other targeted sites aren’t so lucky.

As for Anonymous, they’re proudly crowing about their attacks on everybody’s favorite method of communicating with others on the Internet — Twitter:

And

Despite recent arrest warrants issued by the FBI, clearly, Anonymous has no intentions of backing down. If the group feels you are in violation of their creed — that is, impeding someone’s freedom — and you’re powerful enough for them to notice, chances are they will try to make an example out of you. Granted, DDoS attacks are more of a pain than a battle-shifting type of assault, but it doesn’t mean they don’t accomplish Anonymous’ goals, either:

Shedding light on these impositions of freedom, and well, perhaps themselves, too.

"Like many people we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.

We worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality. It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.

We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there."

Original: According to numerous reports, the Egyptian government has shut down Internet access for 80,000,000 people. The same goes for SMS communication.

Internet Intelligence firm Renesys, which considers itself the authority in global, real time Internet intelligence, reported last night:

In an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now. But every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air.

Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet’s global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt’s service providers. Virtually all of Egypt’s Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.

Here’s a small sampling of the Twitter conversation that’s happening. As you can imagine, the tweets are pouring in rapidly. 

Apart from the obvious suppression of free expression that comes from this story, a huge concern is what it will mean for the Egyptian economy and businesses. As Renesys notes, nothing like this has happened before in the history of the Internet, so it’s hard to speculate on the severity of the ramifications, but there’s no question that they are huge. 

Stories will certainly continue to pile up quickly. If you thought Germany’s approach to Google Analytics was questionable, what do you make of this? 

A fresh Wired piece shows that the Internet shut-down has done little to curb mass protests, if that was the goal.

The move by Egypt comes as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) formally opens the process allowing countries to apply for "internationalized" domain names or IDNs, where scripts such as Arabic or Chinese will be used in the last part of an address name.

Representatives of Saudi Arabia and Russia also announced at the Egypt Internet Governance Forum that they have also applied for IDNs under the "ccTLD Fast Track" process.

"The Internet now speaks Arabic," said Egypt’s Minister of Communication and Information Technology. During a news conference earlier today he announced his country’s IDN application, saying, "This proves that ICANN is interested in the multilingual development process of the Internet and we’re thankful to be one of the first to apply for an Arabic IDN."

Today’s launch of the IDN application process follows ICANNs announcement a few weeks ago, at its meeting in South Korea, that it has agreed to the gradual introduction of Internationalized Domain Names.

Initially, IDNs will only be allowed on a limited basis involving country codes, which are designators at the end of an address name. Those countries can now apply to use IDNs in their own language scripts for those "country code" top-level domains (ccTLDs). Eventually, the use of IDNs will be expanded to all types of Internet address names.

"The opening of the IDN application process today will go down in history as a major step in Internationalizing the Internet," said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s President and CEO.

"More than half of the world’s Internet users do not use a Latin-based script for their native language, so this marks the beginning of a process that will make the Internet more accessible to millions of those online users today and potentially billions tomorrow

Related Articles:

>ICANN Approves International Domains

>Respected Security Expert Becomes ICANN CEO

>ICANN Becomes More Independent

The Google deal was part of that, and was made for the promotion of Egyptian products and services using Google’s advertising platforms.

Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf was there to witness the signing of the contract, which occurred at a special luncheon hosted by the US Chamber of Commerce, the Business Council for International Understanding (BCIU), and the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt (AmCham Egypt).

Under the agreement, Google is to invest 25% of the money back into the Egyptian economy. Over the medium to long term, Google’s USD $2.5 million investment agreement may include: growing digital media start-ups, incubation venture capital, angel funding of the ICT sector and potentially training students in online advertising.

"Across the Middle East, Google is focused on helping local businesses to get online and benefit from the digital economy to create sustainable local economic growth," the ITIDA representative tells me.

A.T. Kearney just named Egypt to the sixth position on its 2009 Global Services Location Index. This is the first time it has entered the top 10.

By telling his followers one word, ARRESTED, James Karl Buck managed to set off a chain of interest and attention that led to his release from jail. The Twitter ‘tweet’ ended up being heard by several major news publications, rights organizations, and ultimately the US Embassy.

“On 10 April around 6pm I was photographing outside the Mahalla police 1st station,” Buck wrote. “Police surrounded me and despite the efforts of the crowd to get me free, police caught our taxi and told the driver I was from the CIA.”

Buck and a local translator, Mohammed Salah Ahmed Maree, were released but re-arrested a second time. Though police later let Buck go, Maree was not, and is apparently still in police custody.

Once news of Buck’s arrest began to circulate among his Twitter connections, they alerted UC-Berkeley and the US Embassy. The school arranged for a local attorney for Buck, the Mercury News said.

Now back in America, Buck and others plan to hold a demonstration outside the Egyptian consulate in San Francisco on Friday morning to call for Maree’s release. Reporters Without Borders also pointed out several other arrests of bloggers in Egypt, and called for their release as well.