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.

In New York, the “NYPD has formed a new unit to track troublemakers who announce plans or brag about their crimes on Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.”

While in California:

A rail transit provider in the United States disabled mobile phone services to prevent a planned protest on Thursday, attracting criticism and unflattering comparisons to crackdowns on dissent in the Middle East.
Demonstrators in northern California’s Bay Area had planned a protest to condemn the shooting death of Charles Hill, who was killed on July 3 after Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officers responded to complaints about a drunk man at a station in the city of San Francisco.

Mubarak and Adly are indeed an inspiration to their counterparts in the West.

The National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority NTRA has reshuffled its board, and guess what? Not only did SS General Rushdi el-Qamari keep his post, as the interior ministry’s representative on its board, but also Tarek Kamel, Mubarak’s infamous minister of telecommunication, has joined! You can find both their names on the official website of NTRA.

What kind of sick musical chairs game is going on here? How can the orchestrators of Mubarak’s crackdown on telecommunication during the uprising be rewarded posts in the new revolutionary Egypt?

One of the papers, in English and headed Finfisher Proposal: Commercial Offer, contained an offer dated 29 June 2010 to provide “FinSpy” software, hardware, installation and training to the SSI for €287,000 (£255,000). The name on the invoice, dated Tuesday 29 June 2010, was Gamma International UK Limited.
Other documents, written in Arabic and marked “ultimately confidential”, state that after being offered a “free trial version” of Gamma’s Finfisher software to test its ability to hack into email accounts, the SSI concluded it was “a high-level security system” that could get into email accounts of Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo, as well as allowing “full control” of the computers of “targeted elements”. It went on to describe the software’s “success in breaking through personal accounts on Skype network, which is considered the most secure method of communication used by members of the elements of the harmful activity because it is encrypted”.