Our Diplomats Need to Spend More Time Surfing the Toobz!

As I noted in my last post, DiFi is accusing the intelligence community of having missed the potential volatility of Middle Eastern unrest because they’ve been paying too little attention to social media.

So I decided to check the WikiLeaks State cables to see whether DiFi’s complaint bears out.

Obviously, this is a totally insufficient test. Not only is State not the primary member of the intelligence community that should be tracking these things, we have no idea how representative the cables are of all State communication. (Though there are obviously intelligence community members working under official cover at the Embassy, and one would hope a good deal of our specialists on any particular country’s dialects are stationed in that country.) Nevertheless, it gives an idea of how attentively our Embassies track opposition viewpoints expressed in social media, and how they view social media as a source of information.

And DiFi may well be right.

There are just 14 WikiLeak cables in this database mentioning both Egypt and bloggers (out of 325 that mention Egypt) but just one–dated March 30, 2009–that talks in detail about the actual content of blogs rather than Mubarak’s persecution of them as a human rights issue. (This cable notes that bloggers and other journalists cover torture complaints and a few others refer to specific types of bloggers being persecuted.) The March 30 cable assesses,

KEY POINTS —

(C) Egypt’s bloggers are playing an increasingly important role in broadening the scope of acceptable political and social discourse, and self-expression. —

(C) Bloggers’ discussions of sensitive issues, such as sexual harassment, sectarian tension and the military, represent a significant change from five years ago, and have influenced society and the media. —

(C) The role of bloggers as a cohesive activist movement has largely disappeared, due to a more restrictive political climate, GOE counter-measures, and tensions among bloggers. —

(C) However, individual bloggers have continued to work to expose problems such as police brutality and corporate malfeasance.

[snip]

(C) Egypt has an estimated 160,000 bloggers who write in Arabic, and sometimes in English, about a wide variety of topics, from social life to politics to literature. One can view posts ranging from videos of alleged police brutality (ref B), to comments about the GOE’s foreign policy, to complaints about separate lines for men and women in government offices distributing drivers’ licenses. One NGO contact estimated for us that a solid majority of bloggers are between 20 and 35 years old, and that about 30 percent of blogs focus on politics. Blogs have spread throughout the population to become vehicles for a wide range of activists, students, journalists and ordinary citizens to express their views on almost any issue they choose. As such, the blogs have significantly broadened the range of topics that Egyptians are able to discuss publicly.

It’s not clear whether anyone at the Embassy made an independent assessment of the blogs themselves; the cable is heavily reliant on the viewpoints of at least three different sources, as well as the comments of “two young upper middle-class bloggers” and one female political blogger not identified demographically.

Meanwhile, just 5 cables mention both Facebook and Egypt (two cables appear in both searches). Two of these cables simply count the growing number of Mohamed el Baradei Facebook fans. One of them–an April 16, 2008 cable titled, “Mahalla Riots: Isolated Incident or Tip of an Iceberg?” and reviewing the April 6, 2008 events–probably should have alerted US authorities to track Facebook more closely.

(C) April 6 brought together disparate opposition forces together with numerous non-activist Egyptians, with the Facebook calls for a strike attracting 70,000 people on-line, and garnering widespread national attention. The nexus of the upper and middle-class Facebook users, and their poorer counterparts in the factories of Mahalla, craeated a new dynamic. One senior insider mused, “Who could have imagined that a few kids on the internet could foment a buzz that the entire country noticed? I wish we could do that in the National Democratic Party.”

Though the reference to the “senior insider” complaining that Egypt’s NDP couldn’t foment as much buzz as “a few kids on the internet” suggests the assessment of the importance of Facebook to the movement may have come from Egyptians, not from any analysis conducted in the Embassy itself.

Just as tellingly, most of the 7 cables on Egypt and April 6 are among those that discuss social media (that is, State knew or should have known that social media was an important tool for the April 6 movement).

Meanwhile, it’s even worse for Tunisia. Just one cable (out of 81) mentions Tunisia and either blogger or Facebook–and that’s a report on the Embassy’s own use of Facebook!

At least in the case of Egypt, the Embassy had both warning that Mubarak’s government considers bloggers enough of a threat to persecute, as well as some sense that social media has served an organizing function.

Yet even with that warning, Embassy staffers don’t appear to have spent much time learning from social media.

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  1. earlofhuntingdon says:

    I wonder whether the “rigorous” process, or at least the careful screening which hires that join State are subject to, filters out the kinds of personalities that would think to evaluate social networking media and intelligently consider its influence on the actions of, you know, like those with real power, the kind that don’t wear pajamas and all to work.

    • emptywheel says:

      I think it might even be more basic–a bias in our intelligence community to “sources” (the same one our TradMed suffers from). I’m comparing the other cables and to the extent that they’re not overviews for officials, they seem to be summaries of what “experts” think.

      • earlofhuntingdon says:

        I hope those “experts” are not drawn from the same pool that Fox draws from, or from most of those the NYT’s considers expert enough to put on their OpEd pages. Friedman and Brooks would make a mash of anything resembling thoughtful research and analysis.

        There’s also the basic problem that State, under who-could-have-known-Condi, was thoroughly demoralized, understaffed and underfunded. Cheney’s disdain for State, his putting in place his daughter, spies and sycophants in senior postings made clear that like every other government department, they were to produce only the news and views that Poppa Dick wanted to hear. Otherwise, the exit door was on the right.

        • readerOfTeaLeaves says:

          There’s also the basic problem that State, under who-could-have-known-Condi, was thoroughly demoralized, understaffed and underfunded. Cheney’s disdain for State, his putting in place his daughter, spies and sycophants in senior postings made clear that like every other government department, they were to produce only the news and views that Poppa Dick wanted to hear. Otherwise, the exit door was on the right.

          Wow, does this ever make sense.
          Some of the MSNBC interviews have been with ‘former State Dept employee…’ types. Granted, all interviews should be viewed with large grains of salt, but I’ve still found it interesting to observer their interest in, and ability to discuss, the political culture of Egypt.

          It’s a safe bet that DoS promotional and job performance criteria do not include: “Spends 6 hours weekly checking in-country social network and blogger updates…”

  2. emptywheel says:

    Also note (via G8tekeeper on twitter) how the intelligence community intends to go about better tracking social media:

    In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media.

    [snip]

    Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. (It doesn’t touch closed social networks, like Facebook, at the moment.) Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords.

    “That’s kind of the basic step — get in and monitor,” says company senior vice president Blake Cahill.

    Then Visible “scores” each post, labeling it as positive or negative, mixed or neutral. It examines how influential a conversation or an author is.

    This doesn’t strike me as a substitute for reading posts and tweets and figuring out what’s going on (not least because no one has ever convinced me they’ve got software that understands irony).

    • earlofhuntingdon says:

      The same old “replace people with [outsourced] technology” schtick that corporations are so fond of. It’s a toy that may produce an abundance of false readings, not only adding little to but detracting from the pool of good intelligence our senior decision makers need to be briefed on.

      For comparison, I take the facial recognition training used at the borders. It’s new enough “technology” in its own right and needs a deeper track record and continued rigorous training regime. But it’s already being ramped up with a peopleless software version that is intended to do the “same” thing faster and in far more locations. The chief trainer for the former, peopled, program says he wouldn’t trust it. Since his program isn’t being phased out and he’s well past retirement age, I assume his objections are principled, not just about money.

      When gobs of government [taxpayer] money are to be had without competition, the cart never seems to follow the horse.

    • Rayne says:

      Agree with your comment at (2), they are missing the forest for the trees. They only want this maple, that birch, but in the mean time they are missing the mass of woods catching fire around them.

      In re: In-Q-Tel — I want to know what language they are scanning. Are they seriously looking at sites in Arabic or other non-English sites? Or are they only looking at English language? If they looked at English language alone — some of which are native Arabic speakers writing in English, they will clearly miss content implied in tone or mis-translated. See Egyptian Chronicles as an example; great site, but one must have a grasp of Arab-ish or Engl-ic, particularly when a post appears to be written in haste or under emotional pressure.

      Have we had enough interpreters, whether on State Dept. staff or at contractors, too, when the scanning fails? This continues to be a bottleneck; was pointed out that ads for translators have been posted, but at prices which may not yield quality or quantity depending on language and location.

      And lastly, is what we are seeing the fruits of pushing content versus pulling content? How much of the Iranian “Green Revolution” was the result of content pushed into Iran versus the result of content interpreted over time? Did the State Department view the “Green Revolution’s” generation of content as a one-off, in part because they were pushing content?

      I ask because there’s been a desire to change the regime in Iran, but no such desire to mess with either Tunisia or Egypt. Did they not monitor — pull content for analysis — from these two nations because they weren’t pushing any content into them?

      • emptywheel says:

        I ask because there’s been a desire to change the regime in Iran, but no such desire to mess with either Tunisia or Egypt. Did they not monitor — pull content for analysis — from these two nations because they weren’t pushing any content into them?

        Yes, almost certainly. That’s also why more of this (by no means most) was probably done at the Embassy, bc the spooks are busy chasing down terrorists and we felt we didn’t have to tend to Mubarak.

    • klynn says:

      Educated individuals, seeking freedom, know to blog about characters in literature, art, music who or which embody a vision or carry out an action which is necessary in building a free society.

      Done effectively on a blog, the software you note would never clue in…

      • emptywheel says:

        The form I did my dissertation on–the feuillton, which grew to be an important opposition form in many countries–was effectively created as the “cultural” part of the newspaper days after Napoleon announced he was going to censor all political news.

        The second feuilleton ever was a review of an opera about the Emperor Hadrian that talked about REpublican generals turning into Emperors and the unnecessary pomp of it all. l

  3. Mary says:

    Well, surely DiFi’s friend Mr. Kappes has kept her clued in, even though he’s not longer an official part of the team. I’m sure he told her, while al-Libi was being shipped off to Libya for a final solution, that the Egyptians were just as happy with Egyptian torture as our members of Congress, like DiFi, have been.

  4. deep harm says:

    As I mentioned in an earlier comment, I urged members of Congress (as early as 2002) to monitor the internet for publicly available information to identify social trends, political unrest, and other large-scale events as an aid to contingency planning. This had been highly useful (and cost effective) in my work as a disaster preparedness and homeland security specialist. But, the government chose instead to spend billions to gain access to the private communications of individuals in the hope of finding a few needles in an enormous haystack. What they have found primarily involved small, poorly executed plots. What they have missed or failed to address are world-changing events like the Middle East uprisings.

  5. klynn says:

    Thanks for the post EW.

    One NGO contact estimated for us that a solid majority of bloggers are between 20 and 35 years old, and that about 30 percent of blogs focus on politics.

    Any educated guess on who the NGO might be?

    To know would be a wealth of information in terms of “connecting dots.”

  6. earlofhuntingdon says:

    They need to spend less time reading the New York Times, too. This understated hit piece by Scott Shane on the Muslim Brotherhood – As Islamist Group Rises, Its Intentions Are Unclear – doesn’t square with analyses I’ve read in European and English language ME sources.

    While the text is more nuanced than the article’s “B” Movie title, it still reads more like Bill Keller on Julian Assange than Juan Cole on the Muslim Brotherhood of today’s Egypt.

    • earlofhuntingdon says:

      This article by Stephen Castle isn’t much better. The title – Europeans Struggle for Consistency on Egypt – has all the trappings of an attempt to make the EU look as feckless as the White House at times has been.

      It looks ominous until you look at the two points of view Castle presents: a hard line from the Brits that government instituted violence against its citizens is unacceptable and that Mubarak should go, versus this quote from Silvio Berlusconi:

      “He said he hoped there could be ‘in Egypt a transition towards a more democratic system, without a rupture, with a president like Mubarak who, for all the West starting with the United States, has always been considered a wise man and a point of reference.’”

      He is parrotting Joe Biden/Lieberman. He also about to be indicted for multiple sex crimes for having had sex with underage prostitutes, among the many actual and near criminal indictments he has endured the past several years. The point being that it’s not clear whether Mr. Berlusconi’s comments were serious, well considered, or representative of the attitudes of most European governments.

      With reporting of this superficiality from the newspaper of record, which might be a baseline for our analysts combing social networking media, what hope is there they will be able to mine the nuggets in franker, sometimes deeper, sometimes nonsensical social networking media?

  7. kgb999 says:

    IMO, this is more a symptom than the actual problem. We have stratified our leadership to the point where it run entirely by members of the financial/social elite. This appears to be the case worldwide. The people we have making decisions can’t conceptualize life as a common person and certainly don’t see citizens as direct participants/impacts within the current system of control. The prejudices and self-superiority of the elite class ensure that they will not accept “wisdom” from someone who is not also an elite. It seems unlikely they ever will recognize in advance that a class of people so far beneath them could possibly impact the game in any significant way.

    We have created a world leadership of clueless aristocrats who don’t know crap about the people they are supposed to be leading – but are expert at using the levers of their power to ensure every situation ends with them at the top of the heap no matter how many of the “lesser” folks suffer to maintain the “proper” order.

    • Rayne says:

      Some of the problem isn’t socio-economic stratification. Some of it is the same thing that happens in the corporate sector: there’s blindness or a form of cognitive dissonance that obscures the view.

      Having worked for corporations gathering competitive intelligence across the internet, I can tell you businesses are all too willing to shut down reception when a researcher finds what they don’t want to see.

      And candidly, they also shut down when they don’t want researchers to keep looking at intelligence they don’t want found. Been there, done that, deposits from final check to show for it.

      I have a nagging suspicion this may also have played a role in U.S. gov’t’s blindness. If you point out the minority report after a foreign entity has done everything possible to marginalize it, you legitimize it. So don’t point to it, stop looking at it, it will go away.

      Or so they probably thought.

  8. nextstopchicago says:

    I’m not sure whether your article implies you’re concerned that State didn’t catch this stuff, or whether you are merely noting that State didn’t catch it.

    For myself, I’m glad. After all, Feinstein’s anger seems to relate to the Post article that talkingpointsmemo posted yesterday – in which she was one of two Senators blocking a pro-democracy resolution over the summer. So this idea that she’s angry she didn’t get an earlier tip off strikes me as anger that she didn’t have more information with which to help her friend Mubarak. I’m delighted she didn’t get the info.

    I also think there’s a lot to the thesis posted on dailydish at the Atlantic today – that repression of dissent makes it likely that revolutionary movements will appear as if from nowhere, because most people mask their dissatisfaction until the moment that some subtle change helps them recognize that everyone shares their disgust.

    That’s what happened in Tunisia, where at least one Tunisian writing in the Guardian identified Wikileaks as the “subtle change”. “And then Wikileaks made revealed what everyone was only whispering.”

    The fact that there was dissent, even relatively successful dissent in 2008, and that it took advantage of social media, may not be that significant. Presumably there have been networks of dissent for decades. The question is how do you notice that that dissent has reached a tipping point. And among other things, Egypt didn’t reach a tipping point until post-Tunisia. And it’s not clear to me that without the example of Tunisia, it ever could have.

    If the question is why, in the handful of days between Tunisia and 1/25, our intelligence people didn’t know that Mubarak was ripe, well, on the one hand, I don’t care much that they didn’t, and on the other hand, maybe they did suspect it. There wasn’t even time to develop the supporting arguments before it all came to pass.

    As I’ve seen the developments today, I’m coming to sympathize a bit more with the administration (on Egypt anyway) than I did two days ago. But still, the proof of words is in actions. At this point, we’ve got Tantawi coming to the Square, Suleiman apparently in talks about having Mubarak emasculate himself (my word for keeping his post but not his authority). Those things are interesting, but not conclusive. We’ve had fresh incidents of reporters and activists arrested today, with collusion of military units. Have the troops not got the message about “free and fair elections” yet? Are they still trying to explain no doubt surprising policies? Or are they faking it?

    • readerOfTeaLeaves says:

      After all, Feinstein’s anger seems to relate to the Post article that talkingpointsmemo posted yesterday – in which she was one of two Senators blocking a pro-democracy resolution over the summer. So this idea that she’s angry she didn’t get an earlier tip off strikes me as anger that she didn’t have more information with which to help her friend Mubarak.

      Well, my goodness, what an interesting point you do raise. ‘Tis possible.

      However, whether or not it is true, for so many people around the globe to be caught so flat-footed, including (I presume) the oil companies is mighty interesting.

      We seem to be living in a Black Swan world more and more.
      A Category 5 hurricane in Australia, and a political Cat 4 in Egypt, with apparently very little political meteorology.

  9. nextstopchicago says:

    Well, my editing time expired. But I see now that many of the things I pondered in my comment above Marcey was already pondering in her previous posting. I’m always a little slow.

  10. emptywheel says:

    I’m reading all the cables at this point.

    THere’s a TREMENDOUS interest in NGOs on the part of Scobey and our Embassy in Egypt generally. And a fair amount of disccusion w/the opposition (and, at one point, intervention w/YouTube to get someone’s account back up).

    I think the issue is that State thinks in terms of formal institutions (NGOs and parties) rather than movements.

    Of course that may be the same or different than what the intelligence community follows.

    • readerOfTeaLeaves says:

      I think the issue is that State thinks in terms of formal institutions (NGOs and parties) rather than movements.

      Of course that may be the same or different than what the intelligence community follows.

      Makes sense.

      On a more trivial point, it appears that Mubarak must be thin-skinned and vain; I wonder whether some of these dictators who rule by fear, violence, and thuggery just hate Barak Obama because his rhetorical gifts and attempts to call up the best in people are inherently a contrast to thuggery. (Yes, I realize that I’m risking the Wrath of Mary, but I hope she’ll forgive me ;-) Obi’s not perfect by any means, but from a BBC report earlier and keeping one eye on the Guardian.uk and NYT, I’m kind of getting the sense that Mubarak is dissing Obama. Is dissing the very idea of Obama, who has to contend with the Tea Party, the GOP, the Blue Dogs, and Wall Street. Mubarak seems much more a GWBush type; rigid, narrow life experiences, and the world is a terrible, threatening place.

      If nothing else, Obama grew up partly living abroad, and I just don’t think he finds the world nearly as scary as people like Mubarak and GWBush, whose life experiences are so much more narrow. Mubarak and GWBush could never start a blog, and probably don’t read them. If Obama were still a professor, he’d write one hell of a blog, I’ll bet. And he’d probably read them, as well.

      • jedimsnbcko19 says:

        We have been looking for you!

        We finally found the person who heard Obama say the following!

        1st Obama endorses the Bush agenda of spying on and killing americans

        2nd Obama attacks Unions (the F! the UAW moment screams republican)

        3rd Obama double downs on Bush Wars, (now they are Obama wars)

        4th Obama attacks Teacher Unions (teacher unions now hate OBAMA)

        5th Obama does not attack the Banks? he bails them out? (sorta like what the GOP does)

        6th Obama passes the Bob Dole Health Care Bill (Bob Dole is a republican)

        7th Obama kills the Public Option

        8Th Obama kills Drug Importation

        9Th Obama APPOINTS an insurance executive to manage his health care Bill

        10th Obama does not APPOINT Dawn Johnsen

        11th Obama hand picks the cat food commission to destroy Social Security

        12th Obama supports Blanche Lincoln, a candidate who hates Unions, and has no chance of winning

        13 Guantanomo still open for business

        14.Patriot Act renewed

        15. renditions continue

        16. Bernanke reappointed

        17. Americans targeted for assassination

        18 Obama is all for sending more USA jobs off shore

        19 Obama is for tax cuts for the RICH!

        20. Obama and the TSA porno Scandal

        21 Obama freezes federal wages for 2 years

        22. OBAMA TARP Funds for Legal Services for Foreclosure Victims Blocked By Treasury

        23. Obama lowers estate tax for the rich

        24. Obama tax bill of 2010 GUTS Social Security

        25. Obama wants WikiLeaks Assange charged with espionage.

        26 Obama Fake Net Neutrality Caves to AT&T,Comcast

        27 Obama Wall Street Buddies foreclose on USA soldiers Homes

        Obama Intel is pathetic, we all see how the WH miss the Egypt Revolution

        Come 2012, he is really going to be shocked! when the Left destroys all Blue Dog Dems :)

        • readerOfTeaLeaves says:

          Yeah, I seem to be viewed as an Obama apologist, and perhaps I am to a greater degree than many around here prefer. I’m okay with it. I don’t think Obama is a god; I think he’s a dad, who puts his pants on one leg at a time.

          But in a nation where Glenn Beck and John Boehner are shilling complete and utter nonsense, which they cannot back up with facts, I think a lot rests on electing more, better Dems and continuing to push for structural political and economic reforms.

          There are plenty of good, decent people who did not vote for Obama and who view this mess in Egypt as very scary; and creeps like Beck who are ready and willing to exploit that fear.
          I don’t apologize for failing to castigate Obama in this instance.

          But this situation does raise fundamental questions about the value of intel, when something like this can explode while ‘the powers that be’ have no clue what’s been happening on Facebook. Can’t blame Obama for that fact; he didn’t set this system up.

    • Synoia says:

      The only movements our “experts” in intelligence and the diplomatic corps appears to notice are those in the bathroom, especially after the exhausting work of attending parties and gathering gossip.

  11. ThingsComeUndone says:

    One NGO contact estimated for us that a solid majority of bloggers are between 20 and 35 years old, and that about 30 percent of blogs focus on politics.

    What are the percentage of political blogs in America? What percent of Egyptians write or read blogs? Whats the split here and in Egypt between right and left blogs? In Egypt would right and left apply or would pro government and anti government be a better term?

  12. ThingsComeUndone says:

    The nexus of the upper and middle-class Facebook users, and their poorer counterparts in the factories of Mahalla, craeated a new dynamic.

    Hoe did the bloggers get the poor involved and informed I doubt they all had email. We should be taking notes:)

    • Rayne says:

      It’s called cell phones.

      Americans continue to think of phones and computers as separate devices of which only one is really connected to the internet, but they are not. Cell phones allow the third world to leapfrog to the internet while allowing ancient cultures to pass us.

      Tweeting and integration with Facebook has been absolutely essential to communicating across a socio-economic spectrum as a work-around to bypass state-owned/-controlled media. Because devices are cheap, small and portable, they can allow folks at the very bottom of the economic ladder to be engaged.

      It also helped that the April 6 activist entity which did a lot of blogging was comprised of a cross-section of a nascent labor movement and agricultural workers, ensuring a broader reach across Egypt’s population.

      • emptywheel says:

        There was one cable that talked about the 39% growth in the cell phone market in 2009, with usage expected to continue at that rate.

        Should have been a clue.

        • Rayne says:

          Can you send me the text of that cable? I’m wondering what else might have been helpful in it.

          The volume of cell phone sales jumping that much would have suggested to me that further research was warranted. What we can’t tell without further research is whether demand had been suppressed by market forces or by the government. Or conversely, if market forces encouraged it; looking at the leaps and bounds by which Twitter usage grew during 2009 as an example, one might initially suppose there was a relationship.

          • emptywheel says:

            Sent you the whole cable, but here’s the relevant part.

            ¶6. (U) The number of cell phone users in Egypt grew by 39% in 2009 in Egypt, reaching 55.5 million, according to statistics released
            by the Egyptian Ministry of Communication. Mobinil has 25.4 million
            subscribers, accounting for 45.7% of the total market, Vodafone
            Egypt has 23.3 million subscribers, constituting 42.1% of the
            market, and Etisalat Egypt has 6.7 million subscribers, 12.2% of
            total subscribers. Industry experts expect the market to continue
            to grow for the next three years. (Al Mal, 2/18/2010).

          • readerOfTeaLeaves says:

            Check the Economist website for old stats on cell use and adoption rates; sorry, I don’t have the links.

            Also, the Guardian.uk today mentioned that the Mubarak family may be ‘worth as much as $70 BN’ (Maybe 70 bn euros, not dollars… sorry, to be fuzzy.)

            Also, IIRC it was the Guardian.uk who reported:
            1. A missing Google employee, Egyptian (no clue whether he has since been located)
            2. That a telecom owner-econ (an Egyptian) was tepidly supporting reform publicly, because he felt that it was essential for Egypt’s economic hopes. And given what we are seeing in terms of corruption – a completely gamed pay-to-play system, one wonders how that guy managed to keep his business functioning. It would be interesting to hear A LOT more from him, re: has he been locked out of routes? Become fed up with the baksheesh rates being too high? Had to pay off simply too many people to keep his biz operational? Looked at demographic patterns and wondered how all those potential users can afford cells if they can’t even find jobs.

            And so on…

      • readerOfTeaLeaves says:

        Tweeting and integration with Facebook has been absolutely essential to communicating across a socio-economic spectrum as a work-around to bypass state-owned/-controlled media. Because devices are cheap, small and portable, they can allow folks at the very bottom of the economic ladder to be engaged.

        Ding!
        Also, the utility costs for the electricity to power a computer are simply too high for many people in many regions; however, they can power a cell phone.

        But let us also bear in mind that to text, one must be at least minimally literate ;-)

  13. Synoia says:

    One would think that our, the US’ intelligence apparatus, which can spy on the actions of a comma from a light year away, and copy everything on the internet for study, would have noticed the activity on Facebook. Using a few (Arabic) keywords perhaps?

    Perhaps using the advanced and esoteric skill called “reading.”

  14. ThingsComeUndone says:

    If we want to improve CIA intelligence we should have CIA deep cover OPs try and get a job as a regular laborer then try and see if they can save enough to get married in 6 months and support a family. If poor people can’t do that then there will be unrest sooner or later.

  15. mpaul88 says:

    This exposes what is arguably the biggest problem with U.S. foreign policy today. So much money and effort and attention is focused on “hard” policies like interrogation and apprehension of suspects and keeping tabs on known “bad guys” that simple tools like the internet and keeping up with the pulse of a population is ignored.

  16. ThingsComeUndone says:

    Another idea if the rich, the politicians and the Media all had their all their kids in the army a first strike commando unit sent to be first to fight in every war America would never go to war unless it was really really necessary just imagine how much money we would save.

    • jedimsnbcko19 says:

      Obama hates freedom also! read below

      ” What the U.S. economy really needs is for the government to get off all of our backs, but instead they continue to tighten their grip on us. In fact, the Obama administration is proposing a “universal Internet ID” that would watch, track, monitor and potentially control everything that you do on the Internet.”

      Mubarak probably calls Obama a hyprocrite and says have you ever read FDL?

      Obama is hated by the people who elected him.

  17. Synoia says:

    It was true for a while:

    “The Revolution will be Televised”

    but that statement missed an important point.

    “The Revolution will be Planned on Facebook, and Coordinated on Twitter and Cell Phones”

  18. Teddy Partridge says:

    The idea that DiFi wants anyone to pay attention to blogs anywhere is simply laughable. She HATES the progressive blogs in America. Has she made her not-running announcement yet for 2012? I’d sure like to hear that….

  19. eurogirl70 says:

    If our foreign service didn’t see this coming, they have been asleep at the wheel. There was a great article in the NY Times just this past year dealing with the restless youth of Egypt with few job prospects and anger at not being able to take that next step toward adulthood in the Muslim world, which is a place of ones own and marriage. Without jobs, young people were staying at home and unable to marry; making the prospect of having a real romantic/sexual relationship all the more out of reach. If you can’t secure an apartment as a young man, no girl would be allowed to marry you.

    Again, with the developing world, kids are told to study engineering, law, and finance. Again, many are without jobs because they lack family connections and are working night shifts at tanneries and slaughterhouses for nominal wages. In fact, up until the recent upheavel, Mubark’s government was trying to stave off unrest by funding monies to young couples to marry.

    People want happiness, love, family, and some personal fulfillment. The dam was bound to break!

  20. ThingsComeUndone says:

    CIA spying on internet posts won’t help because they have biases they will ignore the emotional impact of a small post or single comment until the ideas behind it get picked up by the big blogs and by then its to late.
    Witness Macaca the MSM did not cover the story the McLaughlin Group said it would not effect George Allen’s expected Presidential run.
    The Lefty Blogs picked it up the story appealed to us without an understanding of why we like and dislike certain posts the CIA will ignore stories that will have an impact and over react to posts that have no appeal to us.
    Cognitive Dissonance blinds them, Straussian arrogance excuses their dismal of our ideas as silly you can’t predict anything without empathy.

    • Rayne says:

      There are ways to measure impact — trending is just one measure. You can see there was a steady escalation in this sample from Google Trends; not a ripple after a gamed election, but a steady upward trend which may have been coincident with growing social media use, and perhaps with internet-mediated dissent. Finding keywords to check for trending is easy enough to do; just think of tag clouds and how they operate. Pick a website or key text, insert and crunch with tag cloud, pull out the odd outliers and run them through trending.

      There’s no excuses for failing to do this minimal amount; the tools have been around for nearly a decade on a commercial basis. But the blindness the MSM has had is the same blindness which afflicts government agencies.

  21. redplanet says:

    Well. Er. Ah.

    I’m not a great fan of the our CIA. It’s difficult to criticize them in this case, however, because it would seem that the Egyptian people were just as surprised as the CIA.

    Check out this Al Jazeera story.

    Here’s the lede:

    The ongoing unprecedented public protests in Egypt have taken most Egyptians by surprise.

    Many of the country’s independent and opposition analysts are struggling to explain the latest events and what they mean for the future of Egypt.

    They all seem to agree that nationalist feelings and belief in the ability to resist authoritarianism have been revived.

    “I swear to God, I cried out of happiness watching the real Egypt reborn again in the middle of Tahrir square on Tuesday night,” wrote Emad el-Deen Hueesin, a columnist and the daily independent al-Shrouq newspaper, referring to the first day of protests that galvanised the country.

    “Before this day, I used to be one of many people who believe that the people have become dead. What I saw today is that the people are not dead. They have decided to burn their fear instead of burning themselves.”

    • emptywheel says:

      yeah, I think DiFi’s chief complaint is that the IC wasn’t monitoring the Toobz like they do, say, for terrorism. It’s a fair complaint–it’s low hanging fruit they left on the tree.

      I also think part of the problem is that Americans don’t like to think we’re anything less than in complete control of humanity.

  22. eurogirl70 says:

    Being caught sleeping at the wheel like this is the direct result of taking the study of Political Science away from case study and comparative analysis and moving toward qualitative analysis and rational theory. Back in the mid 1990’s there was a push to turn political science into a true science and that meant moving away from historical analysis and human intelligence and toward number crunching. Rational theory is complete crap!

  23. emptywheel says:

    One more interesting point on the cables.

    There are more cables (at least 16) discussing succession than mentioning bloggers. Maybe not a big deal, but it demonstrates one of the reasons why people weren’t talking about a revolution–they were too focused on whether Gamal would take over for Daddy or not.

    Their analytical question, in other words, was too narrowly focused. And, I think, they still focused their notion of where nodes of power might lay too narrowly, but I guess that’s to be expected when you’re talking succession.

    Also, there was almost no discussion of labor. As I understand it, labor has been one of the key organizational groups here. That probably would have been missed whether or not diplomats were reading the Toobz.

    • Rayne says:

      I don’t think it would have been missed if they were looking since labor was behind the April 6 group, and it’s one of the key entities whose use of social media has propelled the uprising.

      But if this administration has a blindspot about labor here, why not a blindspot about labor anywhere else? If they believe labor can be marginalized here, why not there as well, not worth consideration?

      • emptywheel says:

        Yeah, but I also think the leak may have been focused more on things like bloggers and less on labor. That is, I think there’s a bigger chance there’s a selection bias in the process by which we got these cables.

  24. alpaca says:

    do any of you ever disagree with one another?
    the quotes from wikileaks would correspond to you guys getting out of your chairs to start a revolution.
    then others would post-mortem on how the intelligence agencies should have caught this.
    so, you intend to throw the “blue dogs” out, and what replace them with red dog romney?
    good strategy!
    i guess you’ll be happy to be able to groan for the next eight years. what a bunch of anarchists.

  25. nextstopchicago says:

    RoTL,

    I’m sure there is some haughtiness in an 82 year old, dictator of 40 years, treating with the upstart American president.

    I also found it interesting that they sent Wisner to talk. All right, so he knows Egypt. And forget the conflict that he’s paid through PattonBoggs as a lobbyist for Egypt. Can you imagine you’re an egotistical dictator of 30 years, and they have your “hired help” tell you you should step down?

    I had the image of the conversation between Kurtz and the narrator in Apocalypse now.

    Mubarak: Are you an assassin?

    Wisner: I’m a soldier.

    Mubarak: You’re neither. You’re an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.

    And finally, apropos of nothing, and I’m sure it’s the sort of thing that sends the Wacko-Beck fringe into hysterics. But I do find it somewhat amazing that the American president’s first name and the Egyptian president’s last name are reflexes of the same root word. I’m surprised not to have seen anyone remark on that anywhere.

    • readerOfTeaLeaves says:

      Mubarak: Are you an assassin?
      Wisner: I’m a soldier.
      Mubarak: You’re neither. You’re an errand boy sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.

      Yup.

      To which Obama ought to respond, “No worries then. You don’t like us messing around in your internal politics. So we’ll just shut off all of our ‘interferring’ financial support. Next time, offer our errand boy a drink, and BTW asshole, I own the f*ckin’ grocery‘.

      Clearly, I would never have cut it in the diplomatic corps 8-

      And now, lest I get banned for blogwhoring, I’m done…!

      • nextstopchicago says:

        I agree. I wish Obama would pull the military aid. I’m just saying that this may be how Mubarak looked at it.

  26. radiofreewill says:

    The Goopers have stopped watching stories on Egypt.

    All that anti-authoritarianism is making them sick.

    The truth of Cairo is outside of their ‘we control everything’ narratives.

    So, stymied by the facts on the ground, they’d rather watch re-runs of 24!