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Thousands of protesters stormed the headquarters of Egypt's State Security forces headquarters in Alexandria, Cairo, and a nearby town, shutting down its operations across the country, and seizing control of the vast archive of records. Egyptian ex-patriots are calling the day Egypt's Bastille Day. Revelations are pouring out onto the Twitter hashtag #AmnDawla and the Facebook profile, Amn Dawla Leaks. Documents found at the State Security HQ reveal that it uses a product acquired from a German company called Gamma Group to hack into email and Skype accounts.

Gamma Group, in cooperation with Elaman GmbH, offers a wide variety of products, services, and customized solutions from several locations worldwide. Due to our combined international experience and technical knowhow, we also offer consulting and training services that meet the requirements of our customers. The Gamma-Elaman partnership, with a combined worldwide workforce of 50 employees, has successfully been involved over the past five years in multi-million Euro projects. Gamma and Elaman operate out of offices located in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Far East.

In the field of telecommunications, data retention generally refers to the storage of call related information (numbers, date, time, position, etc.) of telephony and internet traffic. The stored data are usually telephone calls made and received, emails sent and received, websites visited, and location data. The primary objective in data retention is traffic analysis and mass surveillance. By analyzing the retained data governments can identify an individual's location, their associates, and members of a group, such as political opponents.

Active GSM monitoring systems simulate a GSM base station to attract GSM phones away from the normal GSM network and log into the system's "faked" virtual base station. As soon as the phone is logged onto the active system, its identity is extracted (IMSI and IMEI). By logging the phone onto the virtual base station the phone can be forced to transmit on a given channel, frequency and time-slot (establishing a "silent call"). This transmission can be picked up by a direction finding system (vehicle based or handheld) which then gives the exact position of the target phone.

Phones can be completely taken off the real network ("intelligent jamming"), fake calls and SMS can be sent to the target phone, and private networking can be realized and the battery of the target phone can be drained. The active system also allows operating within UMTS networks. Collecting the identity of the target phone (IMSI, IMEI) can be done without bringing the phone down to GSM/GPRS, therefore, no jamming of the overall UMTS signal is needed. For all other operations, such as locating the phone, the target UMTS phone will be pushed back into GSM mode.

A passive IP interception system receives all "raw" IP traffic which needs to get filtered, stored, decoded, and viewed. The problem here is that no encrypted IP-traffic can be restored or decrypted (e.g. VPN, HTTPS, Skype, PGP, etc.). This problem can be solved if the intercepted IP data can be grabbed directly from the target PC because encryption takes place "behind" the target PC. This can be achieved using IT-Intrusion Software. Of course, such an approach is only target-based, i.e. the target must be known, and if a Trojan is embedded on the PC all IP traffic can be intercepted.

http://wlcentral.org/node/1429

The Serbian capital is home to the Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), an organization run by young Serbs who had cut their teeth in the late 1990s student uprising against Slobodan Milosevic. After ousting him, they embarked on the ambitious project of figuring out how to translate their success to other countries.

To the world's autocrats, they are sworn enemies, but to a young generation of democracy activists from Harare to Rangoon to Minsk to Tehran, the young Serbs are heroes. They have worked with democracy advocates from more than 50 countries. They have advised groups of young people on how to take on some of the worst governments in the world.

In the summer of 2009, Mohamed Adel, a 20-year-old blogger and activist, went to Belgrade, where he took a week-long course in the strategies of nonviolent revolution. He learned how to organize people -- not on a computer, but in the streets. And most importantly, he learned how to train others. He went back to Egypt and began to teach.

It is hard to imagine the revolutions in the Middle East without Al Jazeera. The channel gave a boost to the protesters and was essential in bringing people out. Thanks to Al Jazeera, you can hear the same chants shouted by demonstrators in Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Yemen, Bahrain, and elsewhere. Al Jazeera helped save lives and forced international media to act. In Libya, as in Egypt, Al Jazeera has been shaping public opinion, challenging people.

Al Jazeera is strongest when it can talk to the people it is covering. Iranians are not watching Al Jazeera. This is why it is so exciting that Al Jazeera will soon have channels in Turkish and Swahili. The Saudis, former Egyptian regime, Gaddafi, and many Arab dictators despise Al Jazeera as do those seen as collaborating with American hegemony or with Israel. Al Jazeera is the new Gamal Abdel Nasser, the nationalist force uniting the Arab world.

The Egyptian April 6 Youth Movement's PR man, Bassem Samir, turned activists into reporters by organizing a trip to the United States for a group of Egyptian activists, where they learned the ins and outs of video journalism. They then went back to Egypt and travelled to major cities secretly teaching more activists these techniques. Samir and his colleagues even trained activists to choose sites for their protests that would make good photo locations. They were also taught how to move their content after it had been shot: Photographers would hand off small memory flash cards at frequent intervals, switch cameras with activists posing as innocent bystanders, and send in camera teams in waves instead of all at once. These training programs led to the abundance of footage from Egypt that we have seen the past few weeks.

http://blogs.aljazeera.net/middle-east/2011/02/10/live-blog-feb-11-egypt-prot...

http://aje.me/ajelive

In October 2001, Egyptian-born Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib was seized off a bus by Pakistani security forces. While detained in Pakistan, at the behest of America agents, he was suspended from a hook and electrocuted repeatedly. He was then turned over to the CIA, and in the process of transporting him to Egypt he endured the usual treatment: his clothes were cut off, a suppository was stuffed in his anus, and he was diapered and “wrapped up like a spring roll.”

In Egypt, Habib was repeatedly subjected to electric shocks, immersed in water, had his fingers broken, and hung from metal hooks. At one point, his interrogator slapped him so hard that the interrogator's blindfold was dislodged, revealing his identity: Egypt's spy chief and now Mubarak's Vice-President, Omar Suleiman. Frustrated that Habib was not confessing, Suleiman ordered a guard to murder a shackled prisoner in front of Habib, which the guard did with a vicious karate kick.

This video was recorded on 18 January 2011 by Asmaa Mahfouz, the girl who helped start the Egyptian Revolution. She shared it on Facebook, and the video went viral. It was so powerful and so popular that it drove Egyptians by the thousands to Cairo's Liberation Square. Below, a transcript of the English translation of her video message:

Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire to protest humiliation, hunger, poverty, and degradation they had to live with for thirty years.

Four Egyptians have set themselves on fire, thinking maybe we can have a revolution like in Tunisia, maybe we can have freedom, justice, honour, and human dignity.

Today, one of these four died, and I saw people commenting and saying, "May God forgive him, he committed a sin and killed himself for nothing."

People! Have some shame!

I posted that I, a girl, am going down to [Cairo's] Tahrir Square, and I will stand alone, and I will hold up a banner; perhaps people will show some honour.

I even wrote my phone number, so maybe people would come down with me.

No one came except three guys! Three guys, and three armoured vehicles of riot police! And tens of hired thugs and officers came to terrorise us.

They shoved us roughly away from the people, but as soon as we were alone with them, they started to talk to us.

They said, "Enough, these guys who burned themselves were psychopaths!"

Of course, in all state media, whoever dies in protest is a psychopath. If they were psychopaths, why did they burn themselves outside the Parliament building?

I am making this video to give you one simple messsage:

We want to go down to Tahrir Square on January 25th.

If we still have honour and want to live in dignity on this land, we have to go down there on January 25th.

We will go and demand our rights, our fundamental human rights. I will not even talk about any political rights. We just want our human rights and nothing else.

This entire government is corrupt: a corrupt president and a corrupt security force.

These self-immolators were not afraid of death, but were afraid of security forces!

Can you imagine that? Are you also like that? Are you going to kill yourself too? Or are you completely clueless?

I am going down on January 25th, and from now until then, I am going to distribute fliers in the street every day.

I will not set myself on fire. If the security forces want to set me on fire, let them come and do it!

If you think yourself a man, come with me on January 25th.

Whoever says women should not go to protests because they will get beaten, let him have some honour and manhood and come with me on January 25th.

Whoever says it is not worth it because there will be only a handful of people, I want to tell him that you are the reason behind this.

And you are a traitor, just like the president or any cop who beats us in the streets.

Your presence with us will make a difference, a big difference!

Talk to your neighbours, your colleagues, friends and family, and tell them to come.

They do not have to come to Tahrir Square, just go down anywhere and say it: that we are free human beings.

Sitting at home and just following us on news or Facebook leads to our humiliation. It leads to my own humiliation.

If you have honour and dignity as a man, come down and protect me and other girls in the protest.

If you stay at home, then you deserve all that is being done to you, and you will be guilty before your nation and your people.

You will be responsible for what happens to us on the street while you sit at home.

Go down to the street, send text messages, post it on the internet, make people aware.

You know your own social circle, your building, your family, your friends -- tell them to come with us.

Bring five people, or ten people; if each of us manages to bring five or ten to Tahrir Square.

And talk to people and tell them, this is enough!

Instead of setting ourselves on fire, let us do something positive. It will make a difference, a big difference.

Never say there is no hope! Hope disappears only when you say there is no hope. So long as you come down with us, there will be hope.

Do not be afraid of the government, fear none but God!

God says that He "will not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves" (Qur'an 13:11).

Do not think you can be safe anymore! None of us are!

Come down with us, and demand your rights, my rights, your family's rights.

I am going down on January 25th, and I will say "No" to corruption, "No" to this regime!

Why is Mubarak trying to squeeze a few more months out of his three-decade career in office and avowing his intentions to stay in Egypt rather than packing for the Riviera? It may be because exile is not what it used to be. Over the last 30 years, things have gotten increasingly difficult for dictators in flight. Successor regimes launch criminal probes; major efforts are mounted to identify assets that may have been looted by the autocrat or members of his immediate family.

Human rights lawyers and international prosecutors may take a close look at the tools the deposed dictator used to stay in power: Did he torture? Did he authorize shooting adversaries? Did he cause his enemies to “disappear”? Was there a mass crackdown that resulted in dozens or hundreds of deaths? A trip to The Hague or another tribunal might be in his future. Slobodan Milosevic and Charles Taylor are examples any decamping dictator would need to keep in mind.