Egyptians Were Unplugged, and Uncowed

For a segment of the young people of Egypt, the date to remember is not when Egyptians first took to the streets to shake off the 30-year rule of Hosni Mubarak. Rather, it is three days later — Jan. 28, 2011 — the day the Internet died, or more precisely, was put to sleep by the Mubarak government.

That was when some of them discovered a couple of polar but compatible truths. One, the streets still had the power to act as Twitter was unplugged. And two, the Internet had become so integral to society that it wasn't unreasonable to consider a constitutional guarantee of free access to it. “It felt exactly like going back in time, but in today’s world,” Ahmed Gabr, a medical student and the editor of the Swalif.net technology blog, wrote in an e-mail. Mr. Gabr included his detailed timeline of interruptions in communications services during the protests: when service at Facebook and Twitter first became spotty, when text-messaging was interrupted. His description for Jan. 28: “Egypt is now officially offline.” In interviews by telephone and e-mail young Egyptians like Mr. Gabr — tech-savvy but not necessarily political — were hardly Internet utopians. They had, after all, seen firsthand how shutting down the Internet had failed to stop the momentum of the protests. But they did make a case that the Internet was an irreplaceable part of Egyptian life, especially for the young. Nothing more and nothing less. The removal of the Internet by their government, they said, was a reminder that they were not free; not truly part of the wider world that they know so well thanks to technologies like the Web.