So let me clarify a few points.

First, and most importantly: you cannot beat the state at its own game. Frankly, I see US and European activists fretting over digital security far more than Egyptians ever did. There was never a genuinely secure way to protect ourselves electronically from the regime and its surveillance apparatus. Any advice I could offer would amount to the bare minimum. You simply cannot outplay the state on terrain it fully controls.

Yes, we had brilliant IT wizards inside the movement. They played a heroic role drafting security manuals and teaching people how to use the internet as safely as possible. That mattered. But strategically, we chose a different path.

Our choice was to become more public, not more hidden. More visible, not more clandestine. This did expose our members to repression. There is no denying that. But we sought to counter that risk through scale, visibility, and broad public participation.

This is why tactics common among many US and European activists, masking faces, ditching mobile phones, extreme operational secrecy, were not options for us. We needed people to see our faces. We needed to communicate quickly, even through phones we knew were monitored.

The level of security some Western activists aspire to resembles what an armed underground organization would require. That has never been our politics.

Your real protection lies in numbers. In crowds. In collective action that is difficult to isolate and crush quietly. That means bringing people into the streets. Organizing strikes at workplaces. Printing leaflets and distributing them in broad daylight, face-to-face, in schools, campuses, and factories. It means standing at the front of a mass protest, not disappearing into anonymity.

This is uncomfortable, risky, and exhausting. But it’s the “safest” way to ensure you are protected.

Reflecting on Ray Acheson’s Abolishing State Violence

I contributed a chapter to a newly published book on Egypt’s New Authoritarian Republic, edited by Robert Springborg and Abdel-Fattah Mady.

Hussein Bilal reportedly left the country sometime after the revolution to work with security forces in the UAE, returning after the 2013 military coup. He then resumed his security career, rising through the ranks of the rebranded Homeland Security apparatus. Bilal held top security posts in Ismailia and Alexandria governorates before being appointed to run Cairo’s Homeland Security branch last week.