Secretary of State Clinton: End the Violence and Lift the Information Blackout in Egypt

As night fell on the Egyptian cities of Cairo and Alexandria, President Hosni Mubarak, the leader of the Nile River country for nearly 30 years, imposed a curfew on thousands of protesters clogging the streets. It doesn't appear to have been obeyed.

Then again, the protesters, most of whom are calling for an end to the Mubarak regime, could say they hadn't heard the news: All Internet access as well as all cell phone networks have been blocked in Egypt. Observers are calling the move one of the most massive information blackouts in the history of social networking.

In the meantime, rumors abound that protesters have been beaten or killed and leaders taken into custody. And in reaction to the upheaval, the State Department has urged all Americans to delay or cancel non-essential travel to the country.

"We are deeply concerned about the use of violence by Egyptian police and security forces against protesters and we call on the Egyptian government to do everything in its power to restrain security forces," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told the press at mid-day. "At the same time, protesters should also refrain from violence and express themselves peacefully."

"As we have repeatedly said, we support the universal human rights of the Egyptian people, including the right to freedom of expression, association and assembly. We urge the Egyptian authorities to allow peaceful protests and to reverse the unprecedented steps it has taken to cut off communications."

Clinton said the protests show that there are "deep grievances within Egyptian society" and that the Egyptian government needs to understand "that violence will not make these grievances go away. As a partner we strongly believe the Egyptian government needs to engage immediately with the Egyptian people in implementing needed political, economic and social reforms."

Clinton's message was echoed by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs. "We are in continual contact....with the Egyptian government," he said during a Friday briefing. "We have not waited for the events of the last several days to bring up our concerns about freedom of assembly and Internet freedom."

President Obama, speaking in a YouTube interview Thursday, spoke out about the protests for the first time. "I've always said to him [Mubarak] that making sure that they are moving forward on reform – political reform, economic reform – is absolutely critical to the long-term well-being of Egypt. And you can see these pent-up frustrations that are being displayed on the streets."

The protests, which followed the government-toppling demonstrations in Tunisia, swelled over the last few days to encompass a broad swath of Egypt's population. They reflect anti-Mubarak sentiments as well as frustration with problems such as high unemployment, torture and inequality. The protesters themselves are, as the BBC put it, "ordinary Egyptians" who want the president to step down and allow free and fair elections.

Egypt's uprising, even more perhaps than the scenes recently from Tunis and Thursday in Yemen, has drawn global attention for its mixture of youth outrage, police crackdown, and the presence of long-marginalized political rivals of Mubarak's regime – namely Mohamad ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and a Nobel Prize winner who has said he would run for president if Mubarak allowed it. ElBaradei flew to Egypt earlier in the week to join the protests. By Friday afternoon ElBaradei had been placed under house arrest.

In a statement ElBaradei declared, "The Egyptian people will take care of themselves. The Egyptian people will be the ones who will make the change. We are not waiting for help or assistance from the outside world, but what I expect from the outside world is to practice what you preach, is to defend the rights of the Egyptian to their universal values."

Universal values in this case extends from the right to assembly to the right to free speech and the right to convey that speech -- which has been deterred by the shutdown of Internet and cell phone networks. The website Gigaom.com provided a trenchant analysis of the situation, and possible mechanisms by which it is even possible to shut down all access. Renesys.com, which calls itself the "Internet intelligence authority," had this to say:

"In an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now. But every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world...The Egyptian government's actions tonight have essentially wiped their country from the global map.

A top tweet of the day mocked the government's efforts to block social networking:

"Everything ██is█████████████fine ████████love. █████████the ███Egypt ███████government ██#jan25 #Egypt #censorship"