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Citizenship under Surveillance: Dealing with the Digital Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2015

Linda Herrera
Linda Herrera*
Affiliation:
Department of Education Policy, Organization and Leadership, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Champaign, Ill.; e-mail: lherrera@illinois.edu
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Extract

The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia … The Internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The Internet is a threat to human civilization.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , May 2015 , pp. 354 - 356
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

NOTES

1 See Greenwald, Glen, No Place to Hide (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014)Google Scholar.

2 Economic liberalization without political liberalization has been called the “dictators’ dilemma.” See Howard, Philip N., Agarwal, Sheetal D., and Hussain, Muzammil M., “The Dictators’ Digital Dilemma: When Do States Disconnect Their Digital Networks?” Issues in Technology Innovation 13 (2011): 1–11Google Scholar, accessed 12 January 2015, http://www.academia.edu/2668609/The_Dictators_Digital_Dilemma_When_Do_States_Disconnect_Their_Digital_Networks.

3 Herrera, Linda, Revolution in the Age of Social Media: The Egyptian Popular Insurrection and the Internet (New York and London: Verso, 2014)Google Scholar, chap. 1.

4 Herrera, Linda, “Youth and Citizenship in the Digital Age: A View from Egypt,” Harvard Educational Review 82 (2012): 333–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lynch, Mark, Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, Al Jazeera, and Middle East Politics Today (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Howard, et al., “The Dictators’ Digital Dilemma”; Richard Norton, “The New Media, Civic Pluralism, and the Slowly Retreating State,” in New Media in the Muslim World: The Emerging Public Sphere, 2nd ed., ed. Eickelman, D. and Anderson, J. (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1999), 19–28Google Scholar; Shirky, Clay, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin Books, 2009)Google Scholar.

5 John Pollock, “Streetbook: How Egyptian and Tunisian Youth Hacked the Arab Spring,” MIT Technology Review, 23 August 2011, accessed 12 January 2015, http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/425137/streetbook/.

6 Herrera, Revolution in the Age of Social Media.

7 Ahmed Ezzat (trans. Amira Elmasry), “You Are Being Watched! Egypt's Mass Internet Surveillance,” Mada Masr, 29 September 2014, accessed 1 October 2014, http://www.madamasr.com/opinion/politics/you-are-being-watched-egypts-mass-internet-surveillance.

8 Ibid.

9 Ibid.

10 The Egypt-based company “See Egypt” won the bid for the MOI contract against the Israeli-founded Narus System and the British Gamma System. Sheera Frenkel and Maged Atef, “Egypt Begins Surveillance of Facebook, Twitter and Skype on Unprecedented Scale,” Buzzfeed, 17 September 2014, accessed 10 December 2014, http://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/egypt-begins-surveillance-of-facebook-twitter-and-skype-on-u#.bpqdxOraj.

11 Ibid.

12 The case was filed as number 63055, judicial year 68, at the Administrative Court. At the time of writing, the final result was still pending.

13 As reported by the advertising agency, Net Edges, on its Facebook page, the Hashtag was top trending in Egypt for a period of at least weeks. Furthermore, “Facebook Statuses, Tweets and even Comics have been heavily used to describe how people felt towards this declaration.” Net Edges’ Facebook page, accessed 12 October 2014, https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=808005422597304.

14 Ewan MacAskill, “Edward Snowden, NSA Files Source: ‘If They Want to Get You, in Time They Will,’” 10 June 2013, accessed 12 October 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-why.