[governance] Arrested - The ability to communicate with the world

[yehudakatz at mailinator.com]

Held by Egyptian Authorities? Time to 'Tweet'

By Mike Musgrove
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 19, 2008; D01

Art. ref.:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/18/AR2008041802803.html?hpid=sec-tech

Print:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/18/AR2008041802803_pf.html

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James Karl Buck says he has Twitter to thank for his freedom.

Buck, a journalism grad student, was arrested in Egypt last week, and his only
communication to the outside world was through his cellphone, which he used to
post a message on the micro-blogging site.

"Arrested," he typed into his phone, a message that broadcast via the Web to
his friends in the United States and bloggers in Egypt.

Buck was detained after photographing a labor rally near a textile mill in
Mahalla, a few hours from Cairo, the capital. The grounds for his arrest were
not made clear to him, he said, though the men who detained him said he may
have been inciting a riot.

Twitter, a social-networking site, lets its users constantly update, or
"tweet," their friends, acquaintances and potentially anybody else with a Web
connection, with short, often mundane messages like "heading to the library,"
"feeling sad" or "working late." Entries are limited to 140 characters, so the
typical update is only a sentence or two, like a super-short blog. The free
service launched in July 2006.

After Buck, who was in Egypt for a school research project, sent a tweet that
he had been detained, his friends contacted the U.S. Embassy and his school,
the University of California at Berkeley, which sent a lawyer to get him out of
jail.

A spokeswoman for the State Department said yesterday that the agency helped
secure Buck's release.

Buck's translator, Mohammed Maree, was also detained, the student said. Attiya
A. Shakran, a spokesman for the Egyptian consulate in San Francisco, did not
comment on Buck's arrest other than to say that Maree has been released.

Buck said he used his phone's texting feature rather than make a call because
he figured it would draw less attention.

"I'm not big on 'What's the new techno-gadget of the week?' " he said. In this
case, though, he said he "came to realize how important a tool like Twitter
is."

The ability to communicate with the world via text messages helped assuage
fears he would "fall into a black hole," he said. "Whether it saved my life, or
whether it just kept me sane, I don't know."

Buck hadn't used Twitter for very long before his trip. Ironically, his
research in Egypt focused on bloggers and journalists who use such tools to
keep up with news.

Biz Stone, a co-founder of Twitter, said he and some of the service's early
users knew that it could be useful in emergencies because they used it to stay
in touch after minor earthquakes in the Bay Area.

"Sometimes people take a look at it and aren't sure how it fits into their
life," he said. "This kind of story paints a nice picture of a particular use
case."

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