Pundits have said for years that the internet is the new coffeehouse. An aspiring Omm Kolthoum or Naguib Mahfouz no longer needs to rely on a Café Riche to expose their work to the public —they can do it from practically anywhere with an internet connection, whether a high-speed wireless café in Cairo or bedroom in Upper Egypt. Budding creative and political movements take root in chat rooms and on social networking sites, while the revolutionary tenor of early twentieth-century parlors is echoed in grassroots email lists.

The sense that a liberal flow of information is vital to a thriving culture and market has prevailed for some time in mature economies. The advent of the internet has, if anything, refined this attitude. But global trends have not always reflected it: The Freedom House, an international nonprofit group, recently declared that 2007 was marked by a reduction in freedoms across a broad swath of countries.

Egypt was no exception. Like many others, it has been forced to tread the slim line between privacy and security, progress and stability. It is still unclear which of these pressures will dominate.

In a ruling at the end of 2007, the Administrative Judiciary Court (AJC) made the notable move of rejecting a petition by Judge Abdel Fattah Murad to block access within Egypt to 51 websites that he claimed insulted him, President Hosni Mubarak and Islam. Then, last month, an appeals court in Heliopolis overturned the six-month sentence handed to an Al-Jazeera journalist jailed while working on a feature about police torture.

But an air of caution has hung over even these apparent advances. The local press reported that Hussein Abdel Ghani, Al-Jazeera’s bureau chief in Cairo, said the threats of prison and fines remain “like a sword hanging over the freedom of the press in Egypt.”

This Damoclesian image has come to characterize the attitude of many Egyptian journalists and bloggers. The brief string of liberal rulings in recent months mark a departure from past practice; whether they constitute a deeper change has yet to be seen. Egypt’s record on online freedom certainly does not sparkle by global standards: Last year, Reporters Without Borders, an international advocacy group, added Egypt to its list of the worst “enemies of the internet.”

Alex Dziadosz Internet cafes are a popular way for Egyptians to go online — and may be one reason surveys undershoot real usage figures.

Moreover, the ‘51 websites decision’, as it became known, capped a year that many pointed to as among the worst for freedom of information in Egypt’s recent history.

Last September, Ibrahim Eissa, editor of Al-Dustour, and three other editors-in-chief of independent or opposition papers were jailed in a high-profile defamation case after publishing rumors alleging President Mubarak’s health was ailing. The year was book-ended by the arrests of two bloggers: starting in February with the jailing of Abd Al-Kareem Nabil Sulaiman, often known by the pen name Kareem Amer, and ending with the imprisonment of Musaad Abu Fagr, an activist associated with the Sinai-based movement Wedna Ne’eish (We Wanna Live), just three days before the 51 websites decision.

Current attitudes toward freedom of expression in Egypt can be traced along the country’s post-revolutionary narrative: The power vacuum left after the 1953 expulsion of colonial authorities was eventually filled by a centralized, rigid power structure; freedoms, particularly those of expression, enjoyed nominal protection —with the caveat that they must not endanger national security. This exception has often been so stringent that it amounts, in the eyes of critics, to censorship. Then came the 1981 emergency laws, satellite television, the internet, affordable computers and, with them, more vocal calls for social change.

The web sparks a broad range of practical and ethical challenges for governments already trying to reconcile the perceived threats to security and stability that unfettered freedoms might pose with mounting pressure from developed nations to lower restrictions on freedom of expression. Abbott Liebling’s famed quip — that freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one — is foiled online: Today, a laptop will do. In a world where technology doggedly advances, the rules, whether toward lenience or tighter control, must keep pace.

The Egyptian constitution does not mention the internet. Like many similar documents, it was drafted with the ephemeral nature of society and technology in mind. Instead of specifics, it outlines a number of rights, freedoms and restrictions that are taken to be definite, but broadly applicable. Freedom of expression, deemed “sacred” by article 47, is among them.

“Rules to communicate, to write, will be different from time to time,” says Hassan Gameia, chairman of the Civil Law Department at Cairo University. “[So] it is a matter of a logic, a principle of freedom. Whatever the tool you are using to go from place to place or to speak is governed by this freedom.”

Because the constitution is based on broadly defined freedoms, it is difficult to alter no matter how vast a technological or social shift may take place.

“In Arab countries we have solid constitutions that have to pass by referendum. It takes a long time,” Gameia says. “[But] you don’t need any amendment to the constitution to conserve the freedom of the media or the press or the net.” He compares it to transit laws. “Whether you are on a bike, in a car, in a train, the road should be safe. Nobody can interrupt your travels.”

Conflicts arise when the speech of one injures another. Defamation and libel are illegal, as is spreading information that could threaten the security of the state. Egyptian bans insulting people in public. Technically, this even applies to phone conversations — though such cases are rarely prosecuted. In other words, your freedom ends where someone else’s begins.

Alex Dziadosz Lawyer Khaled Ali, part of the Hisham Mubarak legal team, says he is pleased with the ruling in the ‘case of the 51 websites,’ but that the future is still uncertain.

The international flow of information in a modern society complicates these issues. International law is uniquely enforceable today, but still far from all-powerful. The simple case of national boundaries illustrates this: Many borders recognized by the United Nations, for instance, do not reflect actual identities, loyalties and distributions of power. One need only look to last month’s skirmishes over the recognition of Kosovo or the dozens of separatist movements stirring throughout Europe and Asia for proof of this.

So dealing with domestic authority is not always easy, especially when the internet — a global forum — is involved. What should the government do if an Egyptian publishes in a French paper, for example? What about a French citizen in an Egyptian newspaper?

“The proof is very easy in these cases,” says Gamaei. “If you can read it here in Egypt, then the crime is committed here in Egypt and you could prosecute it in Egypt.”

He mentions a case settled about five years ago. A foreign newspaper, based in a foreign country, insulted an Egyptian official. The president of the newspaper company was tried and convicted in an Egyptian court in absentia. While the difficulties of enforcing this sentence are obvious, in principle anyone is subject to the law.

Technically, even the language doesn’t matter. An article published in Arabic or English is held to the same standards as one in, say, Swahili or Navajo — although these may be less likely to be detected.

Mohamed Allouba Blogger Wael Abbas welcomed a court ruling that gave blogs the same constitutional protection — and legal responsibilities — as traditional media outlets.

Given the lack of hard documents and sheer volume of online information, one might expect it would be harder to trace suspects in internet crimes. But Gamaei says this is generally not the case. Passwords, screennames, email accounts and IP addresses leave an indelible, though sometimes ambiguous, trail. “You can always find traces of a person,” Gamaei says.

Issues of online freedom are hardly unique to the Middle East. Last year, Thailand banned YouTube after a crude video mocking its king — an inexcusable offense in that country — surfaced. Reports of abuses from China regularly fill the Reporters Without Borders offense lists. Even the United States, whose first amendment is internationally regarded as a paragon of freedom of expression, has jailed a number of reporters and bloggers under dubious pretenses.

Even in this context, the Arab world stands out. According to the OpenNet Initiative, a research group, half of the 16 countries in the Middle East and North Africa broadly filter online content: Iran, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen. Another four — Bahrain, Jordan, Libya and Morocco — selectively filter a smaller number of Web sites.

OpenNet notes that while Egypt does not filter the internet — though it once tried to block a handful of sites associated with the banned Muslim Brotherhood — cases of blogger and journalist harassment abound.

Similar cases continue to crop up in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia and Iran. Two months ago in Saudi Arabia, Fouad Al-Farhan, often called the godfather of Saudi blogging, was jailed. Turkey, generally considered to be a Westernized, progressive democracy in the Muslim world, controversially bans insulting ‘Turkishness,’ which led Istanbul courts last year to pressure a young company to block YouTube after users posted offensive images of revered post-Ottoman nationalist Kemal Ataturk.

In Egypt, the list of such incidents is long. For instance, there are the cases of Kareem Amer, who is now entering the second year of his four-year sentence; Ahmed Mohsen, a recently arrested blogger associated with the Muslim Brotherhood; and Abu Fagr, whose car was allegedly smashed and stolen by security forces, according to the Daily News Egypt.

Beneath all of these activities a question remains unanswered: Why would the state expend so much energy on internet activists when there are so few Egyptians online? Most estimates put the number of Egyptians with internet access around or under 10 percent. According to the World Development Indicators database, Egypt had the 117th lowest rate of web users per capita of the countries surveyed, putting it below Suriname, Saudi Arabia, Haiti, Sudan, Vietnam and Bosnia.

Wael Abbas, an active and contentious Egyptian blogger, says these figures likely underestimate the internet’s real reach here. For instance, he says, many people without direct access to the web use internet cafés.

“There is also indirect influence,” he says. “Stories that are published on the internet are now published in newspapers. Whatever is published on the internet reaches people who don’t have access at all, people who don’t know what the internet is. People now know about torture, about the police, about the demonstrations —this is stuff that was restricted to the internet.”

The international accessibility of the internet adds another twist. “Egyptian bloggers have a great weight in the international blogosphere,” says Cothilde Le Coz, head of the Internet Freedom desk at Reporters Without Borders. “They’re not doing the same job as American or European ones, who mostly gather information. They produce their own. Have you ever heard of an American ‘Wael Abbas,’ for example?”

There is usually at least one police officer loitering outside the Hisham Mubarak Law Center’s (HMLC) office in downtown Cairo. “They say that they are here because the Muslim Brotherhood has something on the third floor,” says Ahmed Seif, one of HMLC’s most prominent lawyers. “But we know this is not true.”

The lawyers at the Center represent a cast of clients frequently at odds with the state. Their roster includes two of the most notable cases in Egypt’s recent history of internet freedoms: the case of the 51 websites and the prosecution of Kareem Amer, whom Seif represents.

The case of the 51 websites actually began in print. Last year, the Arab Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) published an expansive report on blogging; the group alleges that Judge Murad used nearly 50 pages of this report in a book he wrote on the legal challenges posed by the internet.

Alongside HMLC, the Network published an online statement rebuking Murad for using the material without permission or citations. According to Khaled Ali, executive director of HMLC, the judge frequently phoned them, asking them to strike the statement from the web.

“We told him that we will not erase the statement except in one case: if he apologized for what he did,” Ali says. The judge did not, so neither did they.

On February 28, 2007, Murad filed a formal suit with the Administrative Judicial Court. He requested that access to the Network’s site — among 19 others where the accusations of plagiarism were discussed — be blocked. He later added 31 more sites, bringing the total to 51.

The court eventually concluded that defamation alone is not enough reason to censor a website. The ruling stated that the sites, as content hosts, can only be banned by the government when they are deemed a threat to national security or “the supreme interests of the state” — essentially the same rules that apply to newspapers and other media.

The case became a banner for bloggers, human rights organizers and activists of all stripes, both in and outside Egypt. In part, this was because the internet — relatively novel and largely unregulated territory — is considered sacred by activists. “The only thing that has an unlimited margin of freedom [in Egypt] so far is the internet,” says Abbas.

Within hours of the ruling, one of the targeted sites, Rantings of a Sandmonkey, posted its praise of the court. The comment board swelled with congratulations. “Hallelujah!” one read; “You made my day with this!” said another.

“[The court] stressed freedom of speech, freedom of the internet, so these are major points to me,” notes Abbas, who, while not targeted specifically by the suit, says he has weathered months of harassment. “Now I know I am protected by law and that what I’m doing is legal.”

But the victory, while undeniably important for the Network and other advocates, is not final. Murad is expected to appeal within the 60-day limit allowed him, and the AJC noted that nothing in its decision would prevent Murad from filing defamation charges in civil or criminal court.

Even among human rights advocates, the response has been sometimes wary. “We don’t think [the case shows] a real desire to protect freedom of information,” says Le Coz. “When you see what is going on, you can’t affirm freedom of information is one of the greatest concerns of Egypt. It’s rather a matter of logic. These comments don’t violate the constitution and the websites can’t be condemned for that as they’re only hosting the comments.”

According to Menassat, a journalism advocacy website, the court stated that although websites are not specifically mentioned in the Egyptian constitution, this “does not deny the right of the government to ban these websites,” in respect of the government’s power to “impose administrative restrictions.”

But if the case does hold up — as many think it will —it could have widespread effects.

“We are thinking this decision will benefit the whole internet in the Arab world,” says Gamal Eid, head of the Arab Network for Human Rights Information. “In many countries, when the Egyptian country decides something, they use it.” For example, he says, Syria, whose constitution has an article identical to article 47 in the Egyptian constitution, may reference this ruling soon in a case involving the Ministry of Information.

So far, Eid says he is pleased. “We need some victory to continue,” he says. “We need more, but this gives us hope. We can continue fighting.”

Seif, Kareem Amer’s lawyer, hunches over his desk, dwarfed by the countless tomes lining his office walls. An unremitting smoker, Seif speaks in hard, pragmatic terms, in a voice likely honed over nearly a decade working in frequent, sometimes abrasive disagreement with the established political and religious order.

He has represented Amer, a graduate of Al-Azhar University sentenced by an Alexandria court to four years in prison for insulting Islam and the president as well as “disrupting public order,” since last year. Since Amer’s sentencing, it has become nearly impossible to discuss the state of internet freedoms in Egypt without mentioning his name.

Despite the ambiguous legality of Amer’s comments, many were so incendiary that he could not have been surprised at the rage they drew. Still, Seif says, the law was unfairly applied against him.

“One of the articles used against Kareem has changed,” he says. He claims Amer’s conviction relied on an outdated law whereby anyone who insulted Islam could be punished; the updated law indicts only those who use discriminatory or hateful speech, a standard to which he says Amer was not held.

“If we are in the normal setup I will tell you I am sure they will accept our argument. But it is not in a normal setup. Because the subject against Kareem is something related to religious feeling,” Seif says. “[The judge’s] verdict is against the law, but it is in harmony with his beliefs.”

The biggest problem, Seif believes, is that Amer publicly stated he does not believe in God. Because the judge does, says Seif, “he found an article in Egyptian law he can use against persons that say they do not.”

Because of this and other alleged discrepancies, Seif expects the final verdict to be in Amer’s favor. But in a practical sense, this could mean very little. The appeals process will take anywhere from six months to over a year; meanwhile, Amer is entering the second year of a four-year sentence. Regardless of the outcome, his term will be nearly over by the time his case moves through Egypt’s judicial system.

“This is the price,” Seif says. “He chose this way [] We are not in a democratic society. If you want to be against the mainstream, you must be ready to suffer something.”

Still, a ruling for Amer would be significant, if only as a victory of principle. “I think more and more the internet [is becoming] an important tool for society in Egypt, especially after what happened in 2007,” Seif says. “[If Kareem loses,] I think some persons in the government will use his case to argue for [greater] control.

“Some people use the internet to say something against God and Islam and [others say] ‘We want to defend our Islam and our God, so we must restrict this.’ I think this is the cover they will use. Kareem is important in this way for them,” he says.

According to the Reporters Without Borders annual Middle East report, Seif may have a point. The report accuses most Arab governments of using religion to censor media, particularly after a Danish newspaper depicted the Prophet Muhammad in 2005.

“Instead of calming the crowds protesting at Danish embassies in the region, Arab governments chose to censor the media as a way to curry favor with the Islamists,” the report reads. “The episode created a regional precedent and ‘undermining Islam’ became a major reason to prosecute journalists.”

The blog, one of the most beguiling offshoots of the internet, is a constantly recurring figure in this drama. Because blogs are essentially blank sheets accessible to anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the internet, they can range wildly in content, tone and quality. An investigative journalist may use a blog to expose corrupt businesses, while despondent adolescents employ essentially the same software to muse about their troubles with the opposite sex.

Even Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has one.

But no matter how innocuous, putting your voice into the public sphere always carries some risk. Few understand this better than Amr Gharbeia, a 28-year-old freelance translator and publisher of the blog Howliat Sahib Al-Ashagar, translated loosely as “The Arboreal Annals Blog.”

Though the subjects of his posts occasionally meander into sensitive topics like government policy, his blog is largely personal, he says, mostly covering his travels and, as the name suggests, the environment.

His first scrape with the law came shortly after he encountered Murad’s book. Naturally interested in its subject, he decided to purchase a copy, but as he flipped through, he says he couldn’t help but feel he’d seen something before. In particular, Murad included an estimate that the there were about 40,000 blogs in the Arab world. “That was my estimation,” Gharbeia claims.

After Gamal Eid and others discovered more allegedly lifted material, Gharbeia posted what he describes as an “objective” and “factual” account detailing the similarities between the published book and other works.

“I would not have done this had he been a journalist, as this happens so often in Egypt,” he says, referring to the infamously rampant cases of plagiarism in the domestic press. “But he [Murad] was also very much pro-copyright and demanding bloggers stick to the rules while doing the opposite. That annoyed me.”

Eventually he became embroiled in Murad’s lawsuit, listed as one of the 51 websites to be banned. The problem, he says, was that while he was careful about what he posted, the nature of comments posted by others on the blog resulted in the site’s inclusion in the lawsuit. Comments on his website are now filtered through a queue, where he reviews and vets them before they are published.

Now, even after the ruling of the 51 websites, Gharbeia remains on bail, facing a separate charge he has not heard about since last summer. “Something needs to happen. It’s not good to just leave investigations hanging,” he says. “Right now we are in limbo and that’s not a very comfortable place to be.”

Noha Atef has so far been luckier. A reporter for El-Dostour, the famously contentious paper run by Ibrahim Eissa, she is no stranger to controversy. In her free time, she publishes Al-Tatheeb fi Masr (Torture in Egypt), a blog documenting what its name implies — alleged instances of human rights abuses.

She began blogging two years ago after seeing a report detailing women’s experiences in Egyptian police stations that described how, in many instances, they were tortured as a way to pressure their husbands.

Considering the subject of her blog, Atef says she has had relatively little trouble. “I’ve had problems because everybody has problems,” she says. She has never been detained, though she claims that last year a security official tried to intimidate her boss into firing her.

The main check against further harassment, she says, is the state’s concern with its face abroad. When Egypt sits only a step above North Korea in Freedom House’s annual report, or The International Herald Tribune reports the plight of Kareem Amer, the nation’s reputation is tarnished — and, along with it, the potential for foreign aid and investment. “That makes a difference,” she says. “Our regime cares a lot about its image.”

To avoid legal trouble, she strenuously fact-checks her articles. But after Kareem Amer’s case, she says, it is difficult to be certain about anything. “For me, 2007 was not a good year at all,” she says. “But after a while, what they are doing, you get used to it.”

Flip through most anthropology textbooks and you’re likely to stumble upon the theory that the ability to obtain, synthesize and share information is the human specialty. As a sparrowhawk’s sharp eyes help it hunt and thrive in a forest, our unique ability to think, speak and signal is the reason we have become the world’s dominant species.

Reflecting this, technology has tended to expand our ability to communicate, often eroding the importance of physical barriers. The sheer speed of its growth in recent years suggests large-scale political adaptation may be inevitable. Information, it seems, will find a way. “Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail,” Alfred Griswold wrote in The New York Times more than three decades before the internet became a global force.

“If there is oppression against some people, this will increase the freedom of expression. Seems strange, right?” says Atef. “[But] people will find another way to support freedom of expression, even people who are not really into politics [] It’s a game and it will go on.”

One remarkable feature of Thailand’s YouTube incident was the speed with which tech-savvy Thais found the offending video through other hosts. Grudgingly, authorities restored access to YouTube, realizing that squelching the video entirely would be impossible without draconian oversight.

Of course, this is not always the case. “Look at China,” says Le Coz. “As far as the internet is concerned, it’s a real disaster. North Korea found a better solution: no internet connection, and the domain name ‘.nk’ does not even exist.”

As in Egypt, many states have few or no laws dealing specifically with the internet. But this is not to say they are helpless, or even floundering. The Economist reported that the number of countries who actively censor the internet has spiked over the past few years, from a ‘handful’ to 26.

Just as activists have become more sophisticated in their tactics, so have authorities. According to a Reporters Without Borders article, “On a Filtered Internet, Things Are Not As They Seem,” technologies such as router-based IP blocking and DNS redirection are frequently used to give the illusion that websites are inaccessible due to server errors or browser malfunctions, not government intervention.

Still more vexing to activists are ‘modified mirrors,’ employed largely in Uzbekistan. These devices redirect visitors, funhouse-style, to distorted versions of censored sites, where reasoning or wording is modified to undermine the site’s legitimacy.

Abbas says the government is finding new ways to harass cyber-dissidents. “I’m predicting that people are going to be sent to jail for other stuff — espionage, for example.” He offers Ayman Nour, technically arrested for forgery, and Talaat Sadat, arrested for insulting the military institution, as examples of the tactic. “I guess they are going to do the same to the bloggers and the journalists.” Indeed, further defamation charges in the case of the 51 websites are possible, if not likely.

“[Freedom of information] is going down the drain, unfortunately. In the future I hope it gets better, but you cannot predict the future in a country like Egypt,” he says. “Between one day and one night, something might happen that could change things dramatically.”

Security is one of the most frequently invoked reasons for such crackdowns and it has been one of the most common justifications for restricting press freedom.

“It’s a real question,” Le Coz concedes. “Cyber crime is becoming more and more sophisticated and influential. But at least you can’t simply evoke ‘national security’ to shut down more that 100 websites in a row, just as Syria did in December.”

Recall the as-yet-unsolved ‘cyber-terrorism’ that struck Estonia last year, in which most government websites were defaced or crashed through ‘denial of service’ attacks. To some degree, Le Coz says, the internet must be regulated. “The question is, how far can we go?”

The human mind thrives on certainty, drawing conclusions based on information presented to us. Add or remove certain information and the range of plausible conclusions will change. Control of information is therefore one of the most powerful methods of controlling the individual.

“The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race,” John Stuart Mill wrote in his hallmark essay, On Liberty. “If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.”

These convictions have shaped a great deal of modern democratic thought. But there are hazards as well. Excessively wide freedoms can endanger the security and, in some senses, the moral character of a nation.

As the utopian aspirations of modernity peaked in Western nations near the mid-twentieth century, two writers offered dueling dystopic visions to illustrate this dilemma: George Orwell with 1984 and Aldous Huxley with Brave New World. The former painted an authoritarian world in which dissention is ruthlessly and relentlessly crushed; the latter, a society in which human nature has become so shallow and depraved that censorship is unnecessary.

It is not difficult to find parallels in modern states: Kareem Amer languishes in an Egyptian cell, while “2 Girls 1 Cup,” a coprophagic shock video, makes its way through millions of hard drives around the world. For every instance of someone using the free flow of information to root out corruption or advance the body of human knowledge, there seems to be a dozen counterexamples of corrosive or, in some cases, perverse uses of that freedom.

It is nearly universally accepted that speech should not be entirely unfettered — even the most permissive societies do not allow one to yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. The key is striking an appropriate balance.

The next few years will undoubtedly see substantial movements in one direction or the other as internet access becomes more widespread. Access is growing faster in the Middle East and North Africa than any other region in the world according to the OpenNet Iniative; in Egypt alone, broadband connections doubled in 2006.

But in which direction will the movement tend: towards tighter control or more freedom? So far, both bloggers and governments have shown remarkable ingenuity in foiling one another’s work.

“There is a struggle at the moment between these two powers: the power of the internet and the power of the regime,” says Abbas. “You can have free elections, but without free speech, people will not know who is good and who is bad, and will make the wrong choices. It’s necessary for people to be aware, to be conscious, to make the right decisions.” et