January 25: Protest Day in Egypt

Twitpic by Mahmoud El-Nahas @M_Na7as of Egypt

The Guardian reports that Egypt is braced for "day of revolution," tweeting that "Democracy activists, Islamists, workers & football fans demand reform."

Adam Makary is a producer for Al Jazeera English who says the protesters' demands are "protester's demands: increase in minimum wage, dismissal of interior ministry, removal of emergency law, shorten presidential term" Adam adds that "outside of cairo, jan25 protests will also take place in mahalla, tanta, alexandria, ismalia, sohag, fayoum and mansoura." You can follow him @adamakary on Twitter.

Twitter tips:

• The hashtag is #jan25, or try city names, such as #Cairo or #Alex.
• @Dktr_Sus is live-retweeting, a good person to follow.
• Our list of English-speaking journalists and citizen reporters on the streets of Cairo and Alexandria is here. 

Update 1:

• Seems Egyptian security forces/police were unprepared for the size of the protest.   
• If you're in Egypt trying to break the block on Twitter, Hossam (3arabawy) who has been providing important updates from Alexandria, recommends  to use the proxy http://hidemyass.com/#Jan25
• Ahram online has great photos and an hour-by-hour summary of events during the protest of Jan. 25.     
• Another problem facing citizen reporters is lack of mobile network access.  Alshaheeed suggests "All who live close 2 Tahrir square asked 2 unlock their wifi passwords so public use their internet instead of mobile coverage"
• To learn about other techniques for accessing Twitter from Egypt, see the end of this post. 

Update 2:

• I've posted some remarkable videos by citizen journalists here. 

Update 3:

• Find links to Global Voices coverage (more videos, photos, Egyptian blogger reactions) at a page titled Egypt Protests 2011. 

Demonstrations support Bradley Manning in Washington and Quantico, VA

On 17 Jan 2011, On Martin Luther King Jr. Day about one hundred rallied outside the J. Edgar Hoover F.B.I. Building to protest the detainment of Bradley Manning and the "criminalization of dissent."   Manning is believed to be charged in connection with the unauthorized release of two Iraq War helicopter attack videos and 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks.   Participants at the rally included FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley and retired CIA officer Ray McGovern.

Jotman blogged the protest outside the FBI building in Washington D.C. (above photo). More photos  here.

William Hughes (website) interviewed Ray McGovern and Coleen Rowley outside the FBI building:





After short speeches by defenders of the First Amendment, protesters joined a caravan to Marine Corps Base Quantico where military authorities have been holding Bradley Manning for eight months in solitary confinement.

Civil libertarians have described the conditions of Manning's detainment as inhumane and unlawful, particularly in view of the fact Manning has not been convicted of anything. The new United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Juan E. Mendez, has submitted a formal inquiry to the Department of State about Manning's treatment.  

On July 5, 2010 Manning was charged under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for transferring classified data onto his personal computer and communicating national defense information to an unauthorized source. Chat logs disclosed by Adrian Lamo, a former hacker and convicted criminal who has recently received psychiatric treatment, suggest that Bradley Manning had admitted to being the "leaker" of materials obtained by WikiLeaks.

The following video from the Quantico base in Virginia (about an hour from DC) was produced by David Swanson. Swanson, who blogs at warisacrime, comments: "It is a crime to witness felonies and stay silent; Manning didn't."