{"id":6570,"date":"2011-02-15T07:23:42","date_gmt":"2011-02-15T12:23:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/?p=6570"},"modified":"2012-12-26T21:51:40","modified_gmt":"2012-12-27T02:51:40","slug":"why-wikileaks-and-facebook-are-the-future-of-global-politics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/international-relations\/02\/15\/why-wikileaks-and-facebook-are-the-future-of-global-politics\/","title":{"rendered":"Why WikiLeaks And Facebook Are The Future Of Global Politics"},"content":{"rendered":"
He had the cops buying drugs on camera. Two plainclothes officers yanked Khaled Said from an Internet caf\u00e9 in broad daylight. They dragged him into a dingy apartment lobby and smashed his head against an iron door, the stairs, and the wall. They left him there to die and thought that was that.<\/p>\n
Khaled Said\u2019s fate was sadly nothing new. His was simply the most recent and graphic in a long line of Egyptian police atrocities. But then something unusual happened. The grief went viral.<\/p>\n
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Five days after the murder, a Human Rights worker set up a We Are All Khaled Said Facebook page. He posted pictures of Said\u2019s butchered corpse juxtaposed with Youtube videos of Said\u2019s joyous life. Friends and neighbors trickled in. They extended their sympathies, groused about Egypt\u2019s crooked police. Then their friends chimed in. Then their friends. Cartoonists used Khaled Said\u2019s likeness to rally the uprising. In memoriam, he morphed into a clarion call for young Egyptians fed up with the same old. He became the emblematic fallen soldier for a younger, tech-savvier army <\/p>\n
\nAnd then the grief mobilized. Users posted meeting places, security weak-points. Tunisians relayed the news from their own front-line. It became a war-room of sorts. 130,000 users liked the page within weeks. It is 662,000 now, and soaring. \u201cWe would post a video on Facebook and it would be shared by 50,000 people on their walls in hours,\u201d Google-marketing-executive-turned-Egyptian-revolutionary Wael Ghonim recalled<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\nBloggers and students were the foot-soldiers of this revolution. The troops did not shoot. They tweeted. They stormed Tahrir Square but went no further. Five days into the uprising, Mubarak countered with shock and awe: he pulled the plug on Egypt\u2019s Internet. But reinforcements arrived, courtesy of Google. The company\u2019s engineers improvised with Twitter coders to construct Speak To Tweet, an Internet-less walkie-talkie of sorts. When Egyptians dialed +16504194196, they could leave voicemails that were automatically transcribed to Twitter with the hashtag #egypt for all to see<\/a>. In a technological development that should chill governments from Algiers to Tehran to Beijing, protesters can now coordinate massive rallies without even the Internet. Mubarak capitulated, flipping the Internet back on the next day. He resigned on Day 18. <\/p>\n