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Egypt's Revolution by Internet: Inspired by Tunisia, Egyptians began their protests online and then added hard tactics on the ground in their effort to bring down a crushingly effective police state. Mike Giglio on why President Hosni Mubarak should be worried. (Mike Giglio, 1/26/11, Daily Beast)

Inspired by the revolution in Tunisia, the Monday protests began a little more than a week ago, with a campaign on a popular Facebook page. Even as online pledges to participate approached 90,000, however, a large-scale demonstration in the Tunisia mold seemed unlikely. The Jasmine revolution was spontaneous, sparked by a college-educated fruit vendor’s self-immolation, not an organized activist push. And Egypt is a crushingly effective police state, with a long history of imprisoning dissidents and no-holds-barred crowd control. Attempts to organize large-scale protests in Egypt tend to fall flat.

Mohamed ElBaradei and the Muslim Brotherhood , the two opposition players most likely to draw people to the street, had offered only moral support. The Brotherhood in particular had been viewed as the only group in Egypt capable of bringing big numbers to the streets. “The pattern in the past is that there’s a lot of Internet activism, but there’s not always a big turnout on the streets,” says Jason Brownlee, a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center who specializes in U.S.-Egypt relations.

Yet protest organizers combined an Internet savvy with hard tactics on the ground. They got online supporters to coordinate with friends and family by text and word-of-mouth as well as join with traditional activists to put up flyers and reach out to people on the street. In an interview last week, “ElShaheeed,” the anonymous administrator of the main Facebook page behind the protest, told NEWSWEEK that organizing something significant would take more than just activism on the Web. “It’s not just posting,” he said. “To get people to the streets you need to rally. Rally very hard.”

We've come a long way since fax machines brought Gorby down.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 26, 2011 7:20 AM