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Update: Egypt’s Internet is suffering major outages, the Associated Press is reporting. A major Internet provider in the country is saying no Internet traffic is going in or out of the country.

Protests in Egypt are expected to intensify with opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei’s return to Cairo, and reports of Twitter and Facebook being blocked inside the country by Egyptian authorities continue to surface through the social networks themselves, and according to HerdictWeb. Users are also reporting that SMS – short message service – is being blocked as well.

Though it does appear that both Twitter and Facebook are still being blocked, many users are bypassing the blocks through proxy servers and third-party apps. Here is how they’re doing it.
Mobile & Third-Party Apps

Social mobile applications like Blackberry for Twitter or UberTwitter are still working for users in the country. Also, users are employing third-party apps like TweetDeck and HootSuite to update their Twitter and Facebook accounts.

HootSuite Chief Technology Officer Simon Stanlake said that though prior users are able to access Twitter and Facebook from their site, new users wouldn’t be able to authenticate new accounts because it requires hitting Twitter.com. He said their iPhone application doesn’t require a web authentication, so new HootSuite users are accessing the site through their mobile app.

Feds May Send Agents Undercover On Social Networking Sites

By Rick Whiting, ChannelWeb
Federal law enforcement agencies are considering putting undercover agents on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace for investigative and data gathering purposes, according to a U.S. Department of Justice document.

The confidential, 33-page DOJ presentation was obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights advocacy group, which made it public Tuesday. The document was prepared by the DOJ's Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Marshals, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are all within the DOJ.

One slide in the presentation is titled "Undercover Operations: Legal and Practical Issues." The slide included the question "Why go undercover on Facebook, MySpace, etc.?" and in bullet points suggested agents could "communicate with suspects/targets," "gain access to non-public info," and "map social relationships/networks."

Another slide entitled "Utility in Criminal Cases," stated that evidence from social networking sites can "reveal personal communications," "establish motives and personal relationships," "provide location information," "prove and disprove alibis," and "establish crime or criminal enterprise."

Most of the document, entitled "Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites," includes profiles of leading social networking sites and examines which ones are most prominent in different geographies of the world.

The Facebook profile, for example, outlined its history and includes information on whether subscribers use real names, how data is organized, what privacy policies it follows, and whether the company is "cooperative with emergency requests."

The document also examines some of the legal issues federal agents face when assuming fake identities on social networking sites. One slide specifically refers to a court ruling in the case of Lori Drew, a Texas woman acquitted of cyber-bullying a girl who committed suicide.

The document was prepared by John Lynch, deputy chief of computer crime, and Jenny Ellickson, trial attorney, both with the DOJ Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section. The EFF obtained the document through the Freedom of Information Act.

Iran's Protests: Why Twitter Is the Medium of the Movement

The U.S. State Department doesn't usually take an interest in the maintenance schedules of dotcom start-ups. But over the weekend, officials there reached out to Twitter and asked them to delay a network upgrade that was scheduled for Monday night. The reason? To protect the interests of Iranians using the service to protest the presidential election that took place on June 12. Twitter moved the upgrade to 2 p.m. P.T. Tuesday afternoon — or 1:30 a.m. Tehran time.

When Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz Stone founded Twitter in 2006, they were probably worried about things like making money and protecting people's privacy and drunk college kids breaking up with one another in 140 characters or less. What they weren't worried about was being suppressed by the Iranian government. But in the networked, surreally flattened world of social media, those things aren't as far apart as they used to be — and what began as a toy for online flirtation is suddenly being put to much more serious uses. After the election in Iran, cries of protest from supporters of opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi arose in all possible media, but the loudest cries were heard in a medium that didn't even exist the last time Iran had an election.

So what exactly makes Twitter the medium of the moment? It's free, highly mobile, very personal and very quick. It's also built to spread, and fast. Twitterers like to append notes called hashtags — #theylooklikethis — to their tweets, so that they can be grouped and searched for by topic; especially interesting or urgent tweets tend to get picked up and retransmitted by other Twitterers, a practice known as retweeting, or just RT. And Twitter is promiscuous by nature: tweets go out over two networks, the Internet and SMS, the network that cell phones use for text messages, and they can be received and read on practically anything with a screen and a network connection.

This makes Twitter practically ideal for a mass protest movement, both very easy for the average citizen to use and very hard for any central authority to control. The same might be true of e-mail and Facebook, but those media aren't public. They don't broadcast, as Twitter does. On June 13, when protests started to escalate, and the Iranian government moved to suppress dissent both on- and off-line, the Twitterverse exploded with tweets from people who weren't having it, both in English and in Farsi. While the front pages of Iranian newspapers were full of blank space where censors had whited-out news stories, Twitter was delivering information from street level, in real time:

Woman says ppl knocking on her door 2 AM saying they were intelligence agents, took her daughter

Ashora platoons now moving from valiasr toward National Tv staion. mousavi's supporters are already there. my father is out there!

we hear 1dead in shiraz, livefire used in other cities RT

Full article at Time can be found here.

All a Twitter

Twitter is a social networking and “mircoblogging” site that allows its users to send and read other users' updates, also known as tweets.  Twitter is becoming a popular medium to share information in a similar, but more concise, manner as MySpace and Facebook. 

An interesting example of how Twitter is becoming a social justice tool, in April of this year, James Buck, a graduate journalism student at the University of California at Berkeley, and his translator were arrested in Egypt for photographing an anti-government protest. After being arrested and on the way to the police station, Mr. Buck used his phone to send the message “Arrested” to his followers on Twitter. Those contacted the university, the United States Embassy and a number of press organizations on his behalf. While being detained, Mr. Buck was able to send updates about his condition to his "followers". As a result of the message and the efforts of his Twitter friends, he was released the next day from jail after the university hired a lawyer for him.

Twitter is another resource that can be used in an investigation to gather information about individuals and their social networks.