Refaat, who runs the blog “Matabbat” (Speedbumps), was first detained on July 21 after police raided his home and confiscated his computer, the groups said.

“He was accused of offending state institutions, destabilising public security and inciting demonstrations and strikes via the Internet,” the groups said.

“State Security decided to release him on August 17… but an order to arrest him was issued under the state emergency law,” they added.

The ‘Facebook Youth’ attest to this fact.  This is a group of youth numbering about 64,000 linked to the opposition April 6 Movement, who have and are still using the internet, and are members of a facebook group opposed to  Hosni Mubarak’s government’s human rights and democratic track record.

Thirty members of the group were arrested on July 23 as they were demonstrating opposing Mubarak, arrests have continued till August 4 though most of them have not been formally charged.

Due to ISP connivance with the government most have been using internet cafes to access Facebook though, with new rules requiring the users to fill out their names, email addressess and phone addresses before the use the internet cafes they may now be in jeopardy.

According to Menasaat, many big internet cafes are already enforcing this rule.  The cafes have given out the lame excuse of trying ….”to decrease credit card and identity theft.”

Further to this a draft media bill has leaked to the Egyptian media, which if passed will have the president controlling all video and audio transmissions in Egypt, including the internet.  This will spell doom for Facebook activists, bloggers and website publishers as they will face legal repercussions.

Despite this the activists are undeterred, often checking and passing information to each other about internet cafes which do not enforce the rules, so that others can use them.

Ahmed Maher Ibrahim

The Egyptian authorities have re-arrested Ahmed Maher, according to the Christian Science Monitor, as well as 14 others involved in the “Facebook protest.”

Last week, police arrested more than a dozen “Facebook activists,” including Ahmed Maher, who used the social networking site to help publicize the strike, drawing more than 60,000 people to a Facebook group in support.

Mr. Maher was originally arrested and tortured in May, shortly after a protest fizzled out, but he was released without charges. He has now been drawn again into Egypt’s labyrinthine justice system after speaking out to local and international media about his detention and torture at the hands of state security.

“State security officers call me on the phone and send me threatening messages on Facebook – it is a constant campaign,” Maher said before his arrest. “They say, ‘Last time was easy, next time it will be harder. Last time, we only threatened to rape you, but next time we actually will.”

Ah, Egypt, modern-day inheritors of the glories of the pharaohs.

Maher has been separated from the other Facebook detainees and held in the same prison that holds Kareem, the Burg el Arab.

Ahmed Maher Ibrahim, a 27-year-old civil engineer, used the social-networking site Facebook to support calls for a general strike on May 4, 2008, President Hosni Mubarak’s 80th birthday.   Officers from the Interior Ministry’s State Security Investigations (SSI) department apprehended him on a street in the suburb of New Cairo on May 7, blindfolded him and took him to a police station where they stripped him naked, and beat him intermittently for 12 hours before releasing him without charge.

Before the incident, Maher said, an SSI officer phoned him on April 25 to invite him “for a coffee” on the following day at SSI headquarters in Lazoghli, in downtown Cairo. Maher did not show up.

On May 4, it appeared that few Egyptians had heeded the call for a strike. On May 7, however, as Maher was driving in New Cairo at around 1 p.m., an unmarked van with non-official license plates pulled in front of him. Three other unmarked cars, also with non-official plates, surrounded the car and some 12 men in civilian clothes pulled him into the van, where they handcuffed and blindfolded him.

Maher told Human Rights Watch that the men took him first to the New Cairo police station. There, he was beaten and insulted by men he could not identify because he was blindfolded. Maher said that around the time of the afternoon prayers (4:30 p.m.), his captors took him to SSI headquarters at Lazoghli. There, they stripped him down to his underwear, threatened to rape him with a stick, and continued kicking, beating, and insulting him, and dragging him across the floor. The blows fell mostly on his back and his neck, he said, and he lost some hearing after a sharp blow to one ear. Maher said his assailants wore gloves and applied lotion to his back between beatings in an apparent attempt to reduce bruising.

According to Maher, the officers did not accuse him of anything, but asked for the password of the May 4 Facebook group that news reports said he had started. They also asked him about members of the group he had never met. The SSI officers released him before dawn on May 8 with the warning that he would be beaten more severely the next time State Security detained him.

In another incident a month earlier, Isra’a `Abd al-Fattah, 29, was among roughly 500 people arrested by police nationwide in connection with a call for a strike on April 6. (Most of those arrested were from the industrial Nile Delta city of Mahalla al-Kobra, where demonstrations against rising prices turned violent.) `Abd al-Fattah had also used a social network group on Facebook to publicize the April 6 strike, leading to her detention for more than two weeks. Prosecutors had ordered her release a few days after she was arrested when charges against her of “inciting unrest” were dismissed, but interior ministry officials kept her in detention until April 23.

A soldier serving in the IDF’s elite 8200 military intelligence unit was sentenced to 19 days in prison on Wednesday for uploading a picture onto the Facebook social networking site.

The IDF would not comment on the exact nature of the photograph, but said the punishment was in proportion to the committed offense. Military sources said an IDF directive prohibits photography on bases without official approval.

The sources said the soldier in question would be punished for taking pictures on a military base without permission . . .

Last week, The Jerusalem Post publicized the fact that a special unit inside the IDF was working to remove hundreds of classified photos, documents and messages available on Facebook and that the Defense Ministry and the IDF, had issued a stern warning to anyone caught uploading this type of content onto the Internet.

The Post probe revealed that soldiers had posted pictures of advanced weapons training, interiors and exteriors of bases - including the equipment inside them - and troop exercises and locations onto Facebook.

The Defense Ministry said that anyone caught posting classified material onto the Internet would be court-martialed. The ministry said it had no information indicating that foreign intelligence services and terrorist groups were making use of the plethora of photographs and information on Facebook to gather intelligence on the IDF, but sources within the IDF confirmed that the army was racing against time to track down and remove classified information from the popular site

The first is our Committee to Protect Bloggers Facebook Causes page. If you are on Facebook, please join the cause. 946 members have preceded you.

The second is our our Committee to Protect Bloggers Twitter page. If you’re on Twitter, please follow our status updates and we’ll do the same to yours. Twitter is a “microblogging” service, with a 140 character limit, which is also good for disseminating links.

Finally, there is our our Committee to Protect Bloggers del.icio.us account. You can subscribe to the feed, or to a sub-feed based on a specific tag. If you’re also on del.icio.us, you can join our network.

***

Global Voices asserts that Fouad Mourtada has been released from prison with a “full royal pardon.” If this is true, it’s fantastic news for Fouad. Not great news for free speech or Morocco, though, that it took a royal pardon. Can anyone confirm this?

Mourtada was sentenced to three years in prison for creating a fake Facebook profile of his country’s crown prince. Facebook claimed not to have assisted in identifying Fouad.

 In her article in the Journal, Vara quotes a Facebook PR representative denying that the company had provided the Moroccan security forces with the identity of Mourtada, but asserted they might do such a thing in the future.

Brandee Barker, a Facebook spokewoman, said in a statement that the company’s privacy policy and terms of use allow it to share information with law enforcement and other government agencies “when it has a good faith belief it is legally obligated to do so.” But with regard to the fake profile of the prince, “Facebook has shared no such information with the Moroccan authorities,” she said.

Hopefully, this is true. The fact that it took repeated calls by a reporter for one of the world’s most important newspapers to elicit this sliver of a reaction beyond their constant boilerplate is unfortunate. Equally unfortunate is the fact that a company valued by most at just under $2 billion (and by a few as high as $15 billion), invented in the free speech environment of a U.S. university, is unwilling to stand up and unequivocally declare itself in favor of free speech and in opposition to disproportionate sentencing designed not to punish a law breaker but to cow an entire populace.

Given Facebook’s tendency toward closed-mouthedness and its unwillingness to declare for free speech, it will be impossible to take its denial at face value until and unless the means of discovering Mourtada’s identity becomes public.

Update: Facebook responds. Kind of.

***

Update: RSF is trying to find out how Moroccan prosecutors determined Mourtada’s indentity.

Reporters Without Borders wonders how the police identified Mourtada. “Did the police get his computer’s IP address? And if so, how? We have asked the ISP, Maroc Telecom, in which the French company Vivendi is a shareholder, to provide us with the relevant information.”

The CPB wonders as well. And, keeping Yahoo in mind, as well as Facebook’s response below, we wonder if the list of people to ask is one name shorter than it ought to be? Laila Lalami wonders the same thing, in The Nation.

How the Moroccan police found out Mourtada’s identity remains a bit of a mystery. They could have obtained his IP address from Facebook, or from his service provider, Maroc Telecom, or from an old-fashioned snitch. But the preliminary court hearing did not include details of the police investigation, so the possibility of corporate cooperation cannot be ruled out. After all, China cracked down on dissidents last year with the help of Yahoo.

***

We wondered how Facebook felt about the recent arrest and three year sentence of Moroccan Fouad Mourtada for his satirical Facebook page of his country’s crown prince. So we wrote them. What we got was, well, given the precendents set by Yahoo, Google and other American companies, it can hardly be called surprising. It was disheartening, though.

Here’s my first email to the PR department.

To Whom It May Concern:

Could I get someone at Facebook to comment on the recent arrest in Morrocco of Fouad Mourtada? As you no doubt know, satirical Facebook pages are rampant.

I would also be interested in Facebook’s position on the arrest of Facebook commenters in Lebanon and its ban in Syria and Iran.

I am asking for two reasons. I am the director of the Committee to Protect Bloggers and I am also taking part in a weekly conversation with PRI’s The World. Here’s that public radio show’s last Tech Podcast, in which I took part. The next time Clark Boyd and I talk I would like to be able to mention Facebook’s position on these issues.

Regards,
Curt Hopkins
Director
Committee to Protect Bloggers

I received a response, if you can call it that, from a Facebook representative named Jaime Schopflin.

Hi Curt,

Here is our statement on this:

“We do not comment on these specific situations. Under our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use, Facebook may share information with law enforcement and other government agencies when it has a good faith belief it is legally obligated to do so.”

Please attribute this to a Facebook spokesperson.

Let me know if you have any other questions,

-Jaime

Well, that’s boilerplate nonsense. And it stank of expectation. Here’s our non-answer and you’ll report it like a good little collaborator. I decided instead to talk Jaime’s offer seriously and send some questions. Here they are.

Jaime:

Really? That’s it? No condemnation of the imprisonment of one of your users for making a joke? No condemnation of authorities known to use torture (such as Syria) for arresting your customers (sic-Lebanon arrested; Syria banned)? No condemnation of censorship? No advocacy for the free speech that makes your service, site and business possible in the first place? In a morally unambiguous situation such as the suborning of communications for the preservation of personal power no comment except “no comment”? When students in Lebanon are arrested no expression of fellow-feeling or solidarity based on the fact that Facebook could not have been possible were it not for a) free speech and b) an engaged student population?

I’m very disappointed in this response, Jaime, and in Facebook. I hope someone higher up decides that it is incumbent on them to distinguish themselves from companies like Yahoo and Google. In the meantime, I’ll accept this as your answer. (And as to instructing me in how to attribute this “quote” of yours, don’t.)

Best wishes,
Curt Hopkins

I got the same response from a different PR person, Malorie Lucich, from an outside agency called Outcast.

Hi Curt,
Thanks for your email. Here is Facebook’s statement on the issue:

“We do not comment on these specific situations. Under our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use, Facebook may share information with law enforcement and other government agencies when it has a good faith belief it is legally obligated to do so.”

Please attribute to Facebook or a Facebook spokesperson.

Best,
Malorie

This is ridiculous PR boobery, especially for a company that provides a product for radical communication and connection. Do you think they’ll find their voice, if not their souls, if a great many more people ask the same questions? It’s worth a try.

Here’s Facebook’s general PR email address: press@facebook.com. Here’s Jaime’s email address: jaimes@facebook.com And here’s Malorie’s: malorie@outcastpr.com.