Egyptians Get View of Extent of Spying

"Egyptian protestors are releasing top-secret state files. Will CIA & Pentagon kidnap, jail, & nudify them with Manning." -- Jacob Hornberger

Egyptians Get View of Extent of Spying

By LIAM STACK and NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Published: March 9, 2011

CAIRO ­ The files have started flowing out of Egypt's dreaded state security headquarters, part of the post-uprising rush to excavate some of the state's darkest corners.

There are lists of informants from inside the Muslim Brotherhood and the names of judges who helped rig local elections. Even for young activists who knew they were being monitored, the level of detail has been sobering: one found a picture of herself at a party; another discovered transcripts of text messages exchanged with her husband; a third leafed through a biography of his famous grandfather, a former Brotherhood leader.

"It was overwhelming," said Salma Said, 26, who was part of a mob that stormed the headquarters on Saturday night, seeking to preserve incriminating documents that they were sure the security agents were destroying.

Rifling through shelves neatly stacked with files in an underground archive, Ms. Said came across seven party photos lifted off a friend's camera, which showed her and her husband seated at a table full of beer bottles.

"It was unbelievable to be in this room full of files and see a photograph of me and my husband on a friend's balcony," she said.

For many, storming the bastion of the secret police was cathartic.

After visiting the cell where he had been imprisoned, Hossam el-Hamalawy, an activist, wrote on his Twitter feed that he could not stop crying. Another online video gleefully documented the luxurious suite belonging to Habib el-Adly, the now-imprisoned interior minister, including his-and-her cream and pink bathrobes in his private bedroom.

Like so many other milestones, the sacking of the security headquarters has left Egyptians both exhilarated and apprehensive about where the country is heading. Stern warnings from the interim military council about preserving sensitive information have slowed the release of documents. But just enough of the random trove has been published online or in the newspapers to set Egyptians buzzing, adding to the collective anxiety and the sense that the secret police could still be busy compiling files.

"This is a moment exposing what was hidden, but how this will be used is the problem," said Ibrahim Issa, a veteran journalist and founder of a new television station called Tahrir. "What is happening is too much for people to absorb and endure."

Egyptians want an accounting for years of arrest and torture, and a way to prevent any organization from gaining such powers in the future. They were transfixed by pictures of the cramped underground cells and torture implements in the files.

There are believed to be around 100,000 state security officers, but the files that have emerged so far do not name many individuals. One identifies local judges who helped rig the 2005 parliamentary election; another names a local treasurer for the Muslim Brotherhood who provided information; a third listed 38 people who spied for the police, including members of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Coptic Church.

Naming names prompted debate. "This document puts the lives of many people in danger," Abdurrahman Khalid wrote on a Facebook page publishing the documents. "But should we protect the spies?"

It is not clear who will be held to account; few believe that an interim military government will have appetite for a truth-and-reconciliation commission. Egyptians have pressed to try the head of the security service and dismantle the organization.

"State security in its current form, with all its officers, has to be dissolved immediately," wrote Mohammed Esmat, a columnist for the newspaper Shorouk, "and a new security structure built that knows how to protect the security of citizens and recognizes the value of human rights. It cannot be transformed into a tool of oppression as happened in Mubarak's era."

Charred pages blowing around the grounds of state security buildings underscored fears that much information was already being lost. On Saturday night, the sight of a dump truck emerging from the Cairo compound laden with shredded paper sent protesters into a fury, creating the momentum that drove the crowd past the army soldiers outside and into the hastily abandoned main building.


"They gave the order to start burning their files to prevent prosecution," said Hani Shakrallah, the editor of Al-Ahram Online, the Web version of a semiofficial daily. "The crimes are just enormous, and these guys documented everything."

The documents are impossible to verify, and some may well be forgeries, including those that implicate state security in fomenting violent attacks inside Egypt.

To underscore how easy it is to create false files, someone photo-shopped the state security logo onto a document and then burned it along the edges before slapping it up online. The file started out avowing how the former president, Hosni Mubarak, was still running Egypt from his seaside villa in Sharm el Sheik and then mentioned the discovery that he was actually Mina, the ancient pharaoh who unified upper and lower Egypt.

The military has urged citizens to turn in all the raided documents, and not to post them.

There was nothing in the posted documents about the fight against Al Qaeda or accusations that the Egyptian security service tortured terrorism suspects in the rendition program run by the United States. Nor was there mention of Mr. Mubarak or his son Gamal, a senior figure in the ruling party, nor, aside from the detail about judges, any hint of how the government rigged elections.

Given that the documents mostly detailed salacious personal and financial details about the lives of senior political and media figures, suspicion was fueled that state security destroyed incriminating documents and left other files meant to embarrass the subjects.

The files suggested that state security worked frenetically through the recent uprising centered in Tahrir Square, monitoring the e-mail of the main organizers and all those coordinating the delivery of food, medical supplies and legal aid to the protesters. One recent document discussed personal affairs between the young members of the committee that organized the Tahrir Square protests. Others suggested that state security officers had influenced important television talk-show hosts in their choice of guests.

The breadth of the documents underscored the omnipresence of the security service and its obsession with surveillance. There was a recording that purported to be of a sexual encounter between a princess and a businessman in a storied Alexandria hotel; another hinted at family problems of the grand mufti, the highest Muslim religious authority in Egypt.

Ibrahim Houdeiby, a political activist, found files that dissected the biography and personality of his grandfather, who led the Muslim Brotherhood from 2002 to 2004.

Those were hardly surprising, but Mr. Houdeiby said he was disturbed to leaf through records detailing the arrest of young men suspected of "extremist beliefs." One man, a Mauritanian student, died in custody on March 2.

"The documents said it was a normal death," Mr. Houdeiby said. "It didn't mention any torture, but we don't believe anything they say."

A file for Isra'a Abdel Fattah, once dubbed Facebook Girl for her online activism, contained 10 pages of documents detailing three years of wiretaps and hacked e-mail, including some focused on her divorce.

The secret police printed out all the e-mail regarding her work for the political campaign of Mohamed ElBaradei, the opposition politician who was previously head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. They had a list of every company to which Ms. Abdel Fattah had sent a résumé when applying for a job. One note in the margin, documenting her participation in an American democracy seminar via Skype, suggested that state security cut off her Internet access.

There were also transcripts of text messages, including one from Ms. Abdel Fattah's husband at the time when he told her not to give any more news media interviews.

Discovering even part of her file infuriated Ms. Abdel Fattah, but also filled her with a new sense of power

"I feel like my private life is wide open and everyone can see it," she said, "but I also feel happy because we destroyed this building so that they cannot spy on us again."


https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/10/world/middleeast/10cairo.html?_r=2&scp=5&sq=stack&st=cse