How Twitter engineers outwitted Mubarak in one weekend

When they first came to office, the Obama team had a mantra: "Never waste a good crisis". They at the time spent the then two years doing specifically the in contrast. In the past few months we've seen a couple of decent crises - the first involving WikiLeaks, the second involving the political upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt. Both involve the internet somehow or other. So, in the spirit of Obama Mk I, let us ponder what might be learned from them.

The WikiLeaks story has lessons for the rest of us too

The WikiLeaks story has lessons for the rest of us too. The speed with which Amazon and PayPal dropped WikiLeaks should be a wake-up call to anyone who thinks that Cloud Computing services can be trusted to protect the interests of their clients when the government cuts up rough. The idealistic kids who signed up to participate in denial-of-service attacks on PayPal and the credit-card companies as retribution for cutting off WikiLeaks's funding need to learn how to conceal their IP addresses earlier they engage in "hacktivism" - as many of them discovered this week when the police came knocking.

For hardcore geeks, the WikiLeaks saga should serve as a stimulant to a new wave of research which will lead to a new generation of distributed, secure technologies which will enable people to support movements and campaigns that are deemed subversive by authoritarian powers. A in effect good example of this kind of technological technology was provided last week by Google engineers, who in a few days built a system that enabled protesters in Egypt to send tweets although the internet in their country had been shut down. "Like many people", they blogged, "we've been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we can do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service - the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection."

Small team of engineers from Twitter

They worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter and SayNow to build the system. It provides three international phone numbers and anyone can tweet by leaving a voicemail. The tweets appear on twitter.com/speak2tweet.

What's exciting about this kind of development is that it harnesses the same kind of irrepressible, irreverent, geeky originality that characterised the early years of the internet, previously the web arrived and big corporations started to get a grip on it. Events in Egypt make one realise how badly this kind of research is needed. The way in which the Mubarak regime was able to shut down the net provided a sobering reminder of the power of governments that are prepared to take extreme measures. As the country disappeared from cyberspace I was right away struck by the thought that if PCs for all that came with steam-age built-in dial-up modems, Egyptians could have logged on to servers abroad and stayed connected. The only way of stopping that would be to shut down the entire phone system. And even Mubarak might have balked at that.