The second blogger to stay behind bars is Kareem Amer, whose lawyers received a refusal on their request to have the young blooger free, as he passed half of the period of his imprisonment sentence.

Amer was to pass 4 years in jail in 2007; he has been behaving properly during the past two years, which should give him the advantage of being released as stated in the Egyptian Penal Code.
Few days ago, Lawyer for the Arabic Network for Human Rights (ANHRI) submitted an appeal over the court refusal, to a higher court.

Good to point that both of Abu Fagr and Amer are now kept in the same prison in Alexandria, where numerous crimes of humiliation and ill-treatment took place.

But the officers searched Wael's bag, hunting every piece in it. There was also an attempt to confiscate his camera, but the officer decided to leave it after failing to switch the camera on.

Bloggers and Human Rights activists were able to video the officer while searching Abbas bags.

For no reason, the police agent beat blogger Mak on his back, while asking for IDs. Andd when Mak asked him to treat them respectfully; the officer and around eight soldires and informers started beating Mak and his brother badly.

Mak and his brother were taken to the polcie station, and both of them were released as soon as they reached the station. And there is not clear reason for why all this happened.

Before preventing Mak and his brother from using their cell phones, Mak managed to sent a message (tweet) on the social website Twitter and notify people of the arrest.

On the other hand, Egyptian blogger Hossam El-Hamalawy was able to join Mak on the phone to follow up on what's happening and post it on twitter.

Per is regarded as one of the most active foreign journalists covering the Egyptian labor strike wave and human rights abuses for a number of Swedish publications as well as activist websites like Electronic Intifada. He also writes in his blog Egypt and Beyound, where he identifies himself as:

A freelance journalist currently based in Cairo. Covering the daily struggles for a another Egypt and another Middle East, that are too often made invisible in the narratives of mainstream media.

As usual, Egyptian Leftist was the first to publish “Free Per” banners on his blog.

Hossam El Hamalawy was one of the first to break the news:

Swedish journalist and blogger Per Bjorklund has been stopped around half an hour ago at the Cairo Airport. An Immigration Police Officer told him his “name [was] on the computer,” according to Per with whom I spoke on the phone few mins ago.

Per is in some room at the airport, where there are other people, and he awaits an explanation from the police.

Another foreign journalist, James Buck commented on his blog Journalism not a crime:

Per is a great journalist who helped me get connected when I was in Egypt. Looks like Cairo has decided to keep dissenting journalists out of the country. This is a big step backward for press freedom.

On a different note, Egyptian journalist and blogger, Scarr, published a touching post tackling the other side of the story.

Per was one of the people involved in the To Gaza march – as was Travis Randall – but other foreigners on that march have been in and out of Egypt since then without problems. No, there’s no great plan. This (“your name is in our computer”) is just yet another instance of what they do best: bullying disguised as bureaucratic procedure, as thought-out policy.

Talking about Per's girlfriend she said:

The last call I got in this whole sorry saga was an hour ago, when A rang me, still at the airport. No-one had bothered to tell her that Per had been deported (or at least told that he was going to be deported. His phone was switched off after Hamalawy spoke to him). She had been waiting there, alone, all that time. She broke down in tears.

First tweets about Per's detention.

Egyptian blogger, Mostafa, questioned if the repetitive incidents was a sign for new measures taken by the government against journalists:

Per is a brave journalist and his writing is almost always highly informative. He is a nice guy. This is both outrageous and depressing. I wonder if this stupid government is trying to reduce the number of foreign journalists in anticipation of the next two politically intense years.

More details can be found in a post by Joseph Mayton at Bikya Masr and Zeinobia at Egyptian Chronicles.

Hours before this, major Tamer Adel also questioned Fares about his relation with the strike that will take place on October 2009 -which fares did not know even about-, the Muslim Brotherhood and El-Ghad political party. During this interrogation, major Tamer offered Fares a political position in the National Democratic Party (ruling party) and promised him to be promoted inside the party, in exchange for quitting any other work within the civil society. An offer that Fares refused.

Fares mentioned during a phone call that AbdulHadi asked him several questions about his blog, as well as treating him badly and threatening him to be arrested and to be “behind the sun”, which is an Egyptian expression used to highly threaten someone with jail.

Fares is blogging at Lesani Howa Qalami (My Tongue is My Pen). On Friday, 25 September, 2009, he received a phone call from States Security, and was asked several questions related to his blogging, then summoned to State Security office in Fayoum (North of Cairo) where Fares is living.

The young blogger (25 years) spent around four hours at the State Security headquarter, where he was interrogated about a strike to take place in October and about his political views.

Fares was interrogated by three police officers, one of them discussed with him a post appeared on his blog entitled “Those will spend the feast behind bars with accusation of loving Egypt” in which Fares reminded his readers about the fate of detained bloggers, like Mous'ad Abu Fagr, Ahmad Abu Doma, Kareem Amer and Hani Nazeer.

At the Sate Security headquarter, Fares was offered to stop his activism in exchange for becoming a member of the ruling Party's ‘elite', an offer that he politely refused.

After his release, many Egyptian bloggers covered their friend's experience, calling each others not go to State Security offices when they are summoned via the telephone, as it is not a legal order.

Fares was arrested previously on 2007 and 2009. His last arrest was on 5th April, 2008, while he was handing out flyers in his city calling people to take on the street and protest against the government, as a part of 6th April strike.

He and other inmates had been beaten by prison officers and had their heads shaved by force. Nazeer said that he has now been registered as a criminal detainee, which puts his life in danger as he will be imprisoned with drug dealers and murderers… He earlier complained to ANHRI lawyers that he was being pressured to convert to Islam in exchange for his freedom

Nazeer has been arrested for almost a year, as in 1st October 2008 he was taken from his house in Qena (Upper Egypt) with the help of the church and a wide welcome from local Muslims.

According to the ANHRI, the controversy began when some young Muslims were browsing Hani's blog Karaz Elhob (Love Cherries) and found a link to another site containing an electronic novel called “Azazil's Goat in Mecca” which included an attack on Islam. This novel is written by an anonymous author under the name of “Father Utah” and came in response to Yusuf Zidane's famous novel “Azazil,” which was considered by some conservatives as offensive to Christianity. Hani's village thought he was the author of the story.

For the time being, Hani's blog has no posts; all his articles seem to be removed. The arrested blogger used to criticize both of Muslims and Christians ‘fanatics' and mixing religion with politics.

Nazeer has been detained in Borg El-Arab prison in Alexandria, a place used to detain bloggers such as Musa'ad Abu Fagr, who was beaten up in his prison cell and Kareem Amer who has been subjected to severe torture which resulted in multiple injuries in addition to a broken tooth. Kareem Amer was deprived of the right to report the incident and of the right to document these injuries in a medical report. Two other bloggers were reported to have been tortured in Borg El-Arab like Kareem El-Beheiry and Mohammad Maree.

In order to scare them, and the rest of the egyptian blogsphere, bloggers are usually detained with criminals, or confined in isolation. However, this strategy failed to scare the Egyptian blogsphere which became actively engaged in protesting prison abuses and incommunicado detention.

These crimes against bloggers have occurred within the frame of the systematic phenomenon of torture all over the Egyptian police stations and prisons.

Apart from serving as an additional means of personal communication, Twitter is used in the Arab-Islamic Middle East by a whole range of groups and individuals, covering the entire gamut of society. ‘Tweets' are employed by political and social movements, religious websites and Islamic cultural centers, as well as for the promotion of films, fashion and commerce. News organizations, such as CNN, the BBC (especially its Persian language service), Al-Jazeera and the Voice of America all have popular Twitter feeds. Twitter speeds up the capacity to deliver the news because of its short and restricted structure, so much so that it is often chosen over newspapers as a person’s primary news source.

As a parallel information universe, Twitter enables the dissemination of information, mobilization of public opinion, and evasion of governmental censors.  In Syria, for example, Twitter enabled a wave of protests against the decision by the website, ‘LinkedIn' – a social networking geared towards those interested in business – to block its services in Syria, and the decision was ultimately reversed. Earlier this year in Iran, Twitter was employed by ‘the March 18^th movement' in remembrance of the Iranian blogger, Omid Razah, who died in prison on this date, and to pressure the authorities to release seven Bahai leaders that were arrested during the month of May.

A particularly powerful demonstration of Twitter’s potential came following the arrest of an American journalism student in Egypt while filming a demonstration. He immediately sent a message via his cell phone announcing his arrest to 48 “followers” on Twitter, and the message quickly spread around the world. As a result of the ensuing attention and entreaties, he was quickly released. Similarly, the well-known Egyptian blogger, Wa'el Abbas, was quick to publicize his arrest and subsequent experiences with the police this past April, causing embarrassment to Egyptian officialdom.

The usages of Twitter by women in the Arab world are especially varied, not surprisingly, given the relative anonymity it provides to the user. Twitter allows women to search for spouses, describe their lives, discuss issues pertaining to the status of Muslim women in their societies, and communicate and show solidarity with like-minded individuals, for example, lesbians. Women from Saudi Arabia tend to hide their personal ‘Tweets' so that only those who have received their permission in advance can read their announcements. Women from most other Arab societies, which are socially more open and less hierarchical than Saudi Arabia, are more likely to enable their ‘Tweets' to be read by all.

Women’s advocacy groups make good use of Twitter: for example, the Egyptian group ‘All of Us are Laila' has fought against the inequality in women’s daily lives, in Egypt and the Arab world in general, for the last three years. So does Queen Rania of Jordan, who writes about diverse subjects on an almost daily basis, to a readership of about 125,000.

To be sure, there are those who belittle Twitter’s reliability as a source of information, pointing to its maximum limit of 140 characters per item, and the instant worldwide dissemination of Twitter items without any cross-checking information to confirm their truthfulness. But these limitations are also the basis of its strength. Twitter serves as a speedy and direct platform able to bypass official state media oversight and the limitations on free speech by authoritarian governments. In the Middle East, in particular, it is nearly the only path for different social groups to get their messages across without government interference.

The power of Twitter in transmitting onsite and immediate reporting was highlighted in the months leading up to the Iranian presidential elections and in the subsequent demonstrations against the falsification of the results. Along with other on-line social networks, Twitter served as an almost exclusive source for the unfolding events in the streets of Tehran.

However, Middle Eastern governments have not remained passive in the face of the rapid expansion of the new media, and particularly of on-line social networks which increase the possibilities for individual action and challenges to governments.  The authorities around the region have invested considerable efforts in regulating and restricting these new means of communication. For example, the Dubai government partially blocked the use of the highly popular social networking Facebook website and the internet voice and video Skype program, claiming that their action was justified by “content that was not concurrent with the religious, cultural, political, and moral values of the United Arab Emirates.” Iran has cracked down heavily on Twitter and other social networking sites.  Not only has it blocked access to particular internet sites, it has also installed content filters and monitored traffic on them. This was done by means of Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) features installed as a condition for the company’s access to the Iranian market. The ability to monitor internet and Nokia cellular phone traffic resulted in the arrests of a number of persons transmitting reports about the unfolding events in Iran, resulting in a consumer boycott in Iran of Nokia phones as an act of protest.

Time will tell regarding the impact of Twitter on the relations between Middle Eastern authoritarian governments and their citizens. In the meantime, Twitter has demonstrated a capacity to serve as a means for continuous and rapid dissemination of information among wide sectors of the population.  To be sure, this alone cannot bring about far-reaching social change or a fundamental expansion of political and social freedom, but it certainly carries much potential, and even inspires hope among long-disenfranchised and cynical Middle Eastern publics.

This research has been published on July 26th, 2009: Tel Aviv Notes, Dayan Center, Tel Aviv University (PDF).

It should be mentioned, that this is the first time that an Egyptian blogger is being interrogated for a comment published on his blog. This is an indication that security services are trying to come-up with new ways to attack and repress bloggers and internet users.

As reported before on GVA, the same case happened in Syria with blogger Rokana Hamour as well as in Malaysia with blogger Nat Tan.

Since 2007, The Danish Aid Agency (DANIDA) has supported a joint project between the Danish IT company Quard Technology and the Egyptian company Softlock with a total sum of 2.2 million DKK (US$ 400,000), with the aim of creating a biometric smart card enabling administrators to increase IT-security in public and private offices. Previously a leading supplier of software protection services, Softlock now finds itself entering the booming industry of biometric identification. Danish Quard identifies Softlock as the ideal partner because of its expansive retail network which stretches across the entire Middle East, including countries such as Saudi Arabia, Morrocco, Syria and the Gulf States.

But NGOs like Freedom House question the consequences for civil rights and privacy in Egypt which will result from the introduction of the biometric technology. Internet Director Robert Guerra of Freedom House states: “It could be used for surveillance. It really depends on the implementation - that is, how the biometric data is stored on the smart card, how it is compared, and what logging takes place.” Guerra finds it disturbing that the biometric technology is exported without any prior examination: “Danida should at least ensure that the technology cannot be abused when they engage in exports to countries like Egypt, where free speech is under pressure“.

Director of Softlock, Magdy Sharawy, envisions opportunities for expanding the biometric technology throughout the Middle East. He states that the Egyptian Ministry of Communications is committed to using biometric technology and that his company is well-positioned to become the sole provider: “With this technology, we are the only providers who can satisfy the Egyptian Government's high demands, as the ‘Law on Digital Signature' makes biometric ID cards mandatory within the public service“. Sharawy estimates that within the following pilot period of two years, Softlock will be able to sell 100-200,000 biometric ID cards to the Ministry of Communications alone.

Many questions remain however about security details such as encryption. While the card apparently encrypts fingerprints, Sharawy admits that the ID-card remains compatible with logging technology and that there appears to be no technical obstacles for monitoring users: “We can easily design a program for the ID-card which enables surveillance of user's Internet activities or conversations on Skype, but right now we are just trying to keep up with the high demand on the biometric ID cards alone.“

Together, Quard and Softlock are currently in the process of deciding how to mass produce the ID cards in China. Sharawy describes mass production as necessary for satisfying the increasing demand for biometric technology in the region: “We are struggling with a massive demand from countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf States“.

The Danish Director of Quard, Uffe Clemmensen, flatly rejects that their technology can lead to increased surveillance of citizens in Egypt: “You can not oppress people with our technology. The only thing you can use our technology for is to find out who is logging in“. Clemmensen rejects ethical restrictions on export. He instead emphasizes that the company's large holding of market-share in the Middle East proves that the project has been responsible. Sharawy likewise rejects imposing ethical requirements for the sale of the technology. “This is business. We sell to those who are interested. If I was approached by Iran, I would sell to them,” he states.

While that may be an acceptable position for private business practitioners, Carsten Bondersholt, project coordinator at the Danish Embassy in Cairo, reminds that DANIDA's publicly funded financial support is exclusively granted on the basis of ‘harmless' development security solutions. In light of the criticism, Uffe Clemmensen, Ulla Tørnæs (Danish Mister of Development), and DANIDA, all expressed openess to the possibility of investigating Quard's technology and the possible impact on human rights in Egypt. The issue has additionally been raised by opposition parties in the Danish Parliament, but no concrete steps towards an investigation have yet been initiated.