Is Egypt Next?

[Joanne98]

Khaled Said, a small businessman in the historic Egyptian city of Alexandria, was dragged from an Internet café by police and beaten to death in the street last summer. Said wasn’t known as a political type. But according to human-rights groups, the attack was retaliation for the decision to post a video of cops divvying up drugs from a bust on his personal blog.

The murder clearly struck a nerve. Egyptian activists have waged a longstanding campaign against police brutality and torture, mostly outside the mainstream, and many were surprised by how quickly the news spread among regular folk. “The thing is, he wasn’t really a threat,” says Sherif Mansour, a senior program officer who focuses on new media in Egypt for Freedom House, a watchdog group. “His death made the connection between advocacy and the everyday life of Egyptians. It made the point that everyone can be affected.”

Shortly after the murder, a Facebook page appeared under the name “We Are All Khaled Said.” Run by an obsessively anonymous administrator, it started with posts about Said’s case. But the page quickly spiraled into an all-out campaign against police brutality and rights abuses in Egypt—becoming a clearinghouse for information, posting often-graphic photo and video, and publishing the names of allegedly abusive cops. Mansour credits the page with turning police brutality into a popular debate. The group has organized demonstrations in honor of Said, and today its membership is approaching 380,000, which makes it the country’s largest and most active online human-rights activist group.

Now the group has set its sights on a much bigger cause—taking on authoritarian rule in Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak has been in power nearly 30 years.

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/01/22/the-revolution-comes-to-egypt.html