Nir’s Notes

Barely a month following President Hosni Mubarak predictable re-election, Egypt is gearing itself to a full campaign mode again, as candidates already register for the November legislative polls. The September 7th elections in Egypt, the first ever “open” election have come and gone in the Middle East news cycle, clearing the way for another round of assassinations in Lebanon, another escalation in Gaza, another devastating suicide attack in Iraq. The headlines have told us about the “launch” of a “New path of progress for Egypt”. But words and promises are cheap in the Middle East. Reality has its own pace in mind. The unsurprising victory of Mubarrak, Egypt’s leader over the last 24 years, was accepted, but with little enthusiasm. Mubarrak took 80 percent of the vote, but did so with a turnout of only 6 million Egyptians – who comprise only 23% of eligible voters – and testimonies of election fraud have diminished the “democratic” achievement of this leading Arab country. A new statement by the National Council for Human Rights in Egypt, which is financed by the government, said that the presidential elections in September lacked real democratic competition and that the amended election law “placed very difficult restrictions on presidential hopefuls, especially independent candidates, resulting in the absence of real competition.” The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies’ report on the Egyptian elections said that the mass media was generally biased in favor of the ruling National Democratic Party (NDP) and its candidate, Mubarrak. A report published by the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights questioned the process that kept some challengers off the ballot and allowed state agencies–particularly the Presidential Election Commission and the Interior Ministry–to create conditions favoring Mubarak’s National Democratic Party. The spokesperson for one opposition party – the Ghad Party, who received 7.6 percent of the vote – insisted that its party actually received at least 30 percent of the ballot while claiming that his party supporters were prevented from entering the polling stations. Still, most commentators were almost in consensus when they described ‘Egypt’s first step to democracy.

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This paper investigates the dimensions of the growing influence of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) on the activities and behavior of organizations and movements that seek to initiate or accelerate political change in closed and dictatorial societies (“democratic opposition groups”), as well as terrorist organizations that have targeted Western liberal democracies. These groups represent diverse and even polar opposite positions on the ideological and political spectra. They include domestic and external opposition groups to governments, organized groups of activists with political agendas, quasi-military opposition and resistance groups, radical religious groups, and terrorist organizations. Despite the vast ideological differences between these groups, they share common organizational traits that lead them all to rely heavily on ICT in order to further their objectives

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