· September, 2009

Stories about Egypt from September, 2009

Egypt: Another journalist to be deported

  29 September 2009

To continue the series of harassing or deporting journalists in Egypt, like Travis Randall, Philip Rizk and Wael Abbas; Per Bjorklund, a Swedish journalist and blogger has been detained in Cairo airport upon his arrival. He’s been stopped by security and is to be deported back to Prague without an...

Egypt: Bargaining Bloggers to stop opposing the Government

  29 September 2009

“You will be behind the sun” was the expression used by the Dean Abdul Hadi, General Inspector of State Security at Fayoum (Egyptian Province), while he was interrogating the Egyptian blogger AbdelRahman Fares last Friday, 25 September, 2009, who blogs at Lesany Hoa elKalm (My Pen Is My Tongue). Hours...

The Power of 140 Characters: Twitter in the Middle East

  21 September 2009

The massive, sustained protests in Iran this past month against the regime’s apparent falsification of the presidential election results was enabled by widespread employment of new communication technologies. Among them is Twitter, the micro-blog which enables its users to distribute short messages of no more than 140 characters (‘Tweets’) via...

Egypt Interrogating Netizen for a Blog Comment

  9 September 2009

On September the 3rd, 2009, Khaled elBalshy, the Editor-In-Chief of the Al-Badeel newspaper, who maintains a personal blog at http://elbalshy.blogspot.com, was interrogated by the Interior Ministry's Internet Crimes department for a comment on one of his blog posts left by an anonymous visitor. The comment was in response to a...

Danish-Egyptian Biometric ID-Card Scrutinized Before Take-off

  7 September 2009

Danish aid is advanzing a joint venture that will sell sofisticated biometric identification technology to the Egyptian Ministry of Communication. NGO questions lack of oversight and evaluation of whether the technology can be used to advance surveillance.

Egypt: American blogger and activist detained,Laptop Confiscated

2 September 2009

Last night, Tuesday 1st September 09, the American activist and blogger Travis Randall, who participated in a small march supporting Gaza earlier this year, was detained by security officers for tow hours upon his arrival at Cairo International Airport. Security officers gave no explanation for the detention. Furthermore, they confiscated Randall's laptop and cell phone.