Even yesterday, it would have been too much to say that blogger, tweeters, Facebook users, Anonymous and Wikileaks had "brought down" the Tunisian government, but with today's news that the country's president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali has fled the country, it becomes a more plausible claim to make.
Of course there was more to such demonstrations than some new technology. An individual act of desperation set off the last month of rioting, as a college-educated young man set himself on fire after police confiscated his unlicensed fruit and vegetable cart. Tunisia's high unemployment rate, rampant corruption and rising food prices added to the anger at Ben Ali's 20-plus-year rule.
People risked their lives in the street, with some getting a bullet for their troubles, but the internet played a significant role in organizing these protests and in disseminating news and pictures of them to the world.
After the worst unrest in his reign, Ben Ali this week promised not to run for "election" again and to give the country a free press and the right to assemble. He fired his cabinet. It wasn't enough. Protestors sensed weakness, and today they forced Ben Ali from Tunisia. He fled ignominiously with his family for any state that would have him.
Here's a guide to the part of this battle fought in cyberspace over the last month.
Web blocking: Soon after the protests began, Tunisia ramped up its attempts at controlling the internet. These started simply enough, with straight-up site blocking. In an open letter to the Tunisian government, the Committee to Protect Journalists outlined the online repression:
We'll take that Facebook password, please: It soon got much worse. The Committee to Protect Journalists said its own research found that "the [state-run] Tunisian Internet Agency is harvesting passwords and usernames of bloggers, reporters, political activists and protesters by injecting hidden JavaScript" into many popular site login pages.
This extended to sites like Facebook, where the main login page mysteriously had 10 additional lines of code inserted when it arrived at Tunisian computers. (Such code injection is technically simple using various pieces of deep-packet inspection gear, and it was made easier by the fact that the Tunisian government would periodically block secure HTTPS connections.)
That code grabbed the username and password, embedded them into a bogus Facebook URL, and then attempted to load the nonexistent page. It's unclear why this was done, though speculation is that the hack was a simple way to grab passwords. The Tunisian Internet Agency could simply log all attempts to hit the bogus Facebook link without the liability of listing one of its servers in the code itself.
CPJ noted in a separate report that "unknown parties have subsequently logged onto these sites using these stolen credentials, and used them to delete Facebook groups, pages and accounts, including Facebook pages administrated by Sofiene Chourabi, a reporter with Al-Tariq al-Jadid, and the account of local online video journalist Haythem El Mekki. Local bloggers have told CPJ that their accounts and pictures of recent protests have been deleted or otherwise compromised."
Al-Jazeera interviewed an anonymous source who had crafted a Greasemonkey script that could strip this additional code from login pages. On January 6, it had already been installed over 1,500 times.
On January 11, the Electronic Frontier Foundation publicized the Greasemonkey script but also asked Facebook in particular to consider a few technical changes:
Finding bloggers, pirates: The Tunisian government, not content to simply grab account information and delete the offending material, also began hauling bloggers into police custody.
On January 7, Reporters Without Borders had at least five confirmed cases of bloggers and online activists being arrested. Here's one:
Several of those arrested, including Kaloutcha, were members of the Pirate Party of Tunisia; the Pirate Party U.K. later issued several statements deploring the disappearances.
"Pirate Parties around the world condemn these acts against freedom of expression, human rights and democracy, and call upon governments take firm action against Tunisia for these recent events," one said. A later note said that one detainee had been beaten, and it said that several of the bloggers were accused of "degradation of state property on account of anonymous DDoS attacks."
And who specializes in anonymous distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against unfriendly websites? That's right, it's …
Anonymous: The internet's many-headed hydra, Anonymous, launched "Operation Tunisia," trying to attack the Tunisian government instead of the copyright holders which have been its targets for the last few months.
Al-Jazeera checked in with some of the activists, one of whom explained that Anonymous first got involved when the Tunisian government tried to block access to Wikileaks.
Wikileaks and pet tigers: Why would the Wikileaks revelations of recent months matter to a country like Tunisia? Because of some exceptionally frank dispatches from Robert Godec, the U.S. Ambassador to Tunisia.
In one of the cables, Godec reports on a private dinner he had with Mohammad Sakher El-Materi, the president's son-in-law and a very wealthy man. Given the public dissatisfaction with a regime built on cronyism and suffused with corruption, Godec's report fueled public anger at the regime when it appeared late in 2010.
The report was stuffed with candid details like these:
Godec also wasn't afraid to pass on blunt reports of corruption among Tunisia's leaders:
One member of the family apparently even stole a French yacht, painting over it and having it delivered to Tunisia, where it was spotted and finally returned.
Writing at Foreign Policy, Christopher Alexander noted that this leak, and several other cables, did more than just stoke anger at the regime; they gave people a sense that the United States might share their concerns.
"Given Ben Ali's reputation as a stalwart U.S. ally," Alexander wrote, "it mattered greatly to many Tunisians -- particularly to politically engaged Tunisians who are plugged into social media -- that American officials are saying the same things about Ben Ali that they themselves say about him. These revelations contributed to an environment that was ripe for a wave of protest that gathered broad support."
Tweeting the news: For those craving up-to-the minute news, Twitter has become a terrific source. Writers like Dima Khatib of Al-Jazeera and columnist Sultan Al-Qassemi are providing aggregation and opinion on a moment-to-moment basis.
"Take a breath people," Khatib wrote today as Ben Ali fled his country. "We are living history. Tunisians have given us the best gift ever. I am happy to be living today."
And, as The New York Times notes, bloggers across the Arab world have been cheering on the Tunisian demonstrations.
Oh, the irony: Tunisia, never a friend to openness and freedom of speech, was nevertheless a backer of the "internet." Indeed, Tunis was the location for a U.N. meeting in 2005 that produced the "Tunis Agenda," a document that called for the creation of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF).
IGF is largely toothless, but in the last five years its annual meetings have been an important place for dialog about the future of the very tool that helped drive the Tunisian government from power.
New beginnings: Tunisia has a chance for a change of direction, though at this early date it is of course impossible to predict much about the country's future. For the formerly well-connected "Family" in Tunisia, though, the good times appear to be over. On Twitter, commenters have obsessively followed the movements of his private plane, which has apparently been denied access to France and is now heading to one of the Gulf States.
As for El-Materi, the son-in-law with the private tiger, Al-Jazeera says that he too has made it out of the country and is heading for Dubai.
Bloggers, Internet activists, and Facebook users may have helped push a regime out of power, but it doesn't look even they have enough power to force Ben Ali and his family into a real-life reckoning.