Two leaders of Egypt's youth movement described this evening how they combined non-violent ideals with online social networking to nurture labor and democracy protests over a three-year period, culminating in the massive Cairo protests and the February ouster of strongman Hosni Mubarak.

"Facebook was used--as everywhere else--to exchange photos and other things. We thought we could use it as a political platform," said Ahmed Maher, a civil engineer and a leader of youth movement. He spoke through a translator to about 200 people at an event at MIT's Media Lab

In 2008, Maher and others tried to organize a general strike in an industrial city called El-Mahalla El-Kubra, in part through blogs, text-messages, and a Facebook page. This was known as the "April 6 Youth Movement" because it sought a strike on that date. Their Facebook announcement spread rapidly. "We sent it to 300 members and by end of the day we had 3,000 members. By the end of ten days we had 70,000 members," he said. "People asked 'What can we do?' We said to spread the idea as far and wide as we can."

In May of 2008 he was arrested and, he said, tortured by Egyptian authorities who wanted to shut down the movement and its Facebook platform.

Asked about the role of government in trying to block communication technologies, another organizer, Waleed Rasheed, said: "I would like to thank Mubarak so much.... he disconnected mobile phones on Jan. 27. More people came down to the streets on the 28th of January because he disconnected." By February 1, the protests had swelled to at least 1 million people, and Mubarak stepped down four days later.

The two men said they wanted to now expand their use of social technologies to advance democracy in Egypt, organize political events, and monitor elections. A full webcast of the 90-minute event is expected to be available here within a few days.

The battles over Wikileaks continue, with distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks being launched in all directions. These types of attacks take websites offline by overwhelming them with traffic. They work best when the traffic pours in from sources distributed all over the world, which makes it more difficult to block the attack traffic and focus on helping legitimate users.

Since Wikileaks began publishing diplomatic cables, DDoS attacks have been aimed at the site itself and the service providers who helped it stay online. Unaffiliated supporters—particularly the Internet pranksters Anonymous—have since launched attacks on those seen to be obstructing Wikileaks, including payment companies Visa and Mastercard, which stopped processing donations to the beleaguered site.

But what's perhaps most striking about the DDoS attacks is how easily and frequently they come. The first associated arrest happened yesterday, when Dutch police detained a 16-year-old who admitted to being part of the attacks on Visa and Mastercard. But the public has developed an image of brilliant young hackers engaged in sophisticated criminal activity, and that's far from what happened here.

These days, DDoS attacks don't require much technical sophistication. Early last year, I wrote a story on how these sorts of attacks are on the rise, and are getting easier. My story was based on the work of Jose Nazario, a senior security researcher for Arbor Networks. I wrote:

Nazario says that the bar for launching a DDoS attack has come down significantly in the past few years. Attacks aimed at Estonian sites in 2007 (during a time of political tension between this country and Russia) used botnets and scripts that weren't easy for nontechnical people to employ. Now attackers can purchase tools such as Black Energy or NetBot Attacker (made by Russian and Chinese hackers, respectively) for less than $100 apiece. These kits give an attacker ready-made code and an easy-to-use interface to control a botnet. Attackers have even developed Web interfaces so that volunteers can more easily participate in an attack. Attacks are often coordinated in forums, Nazario says, and easy-to-use interfaces help boost participation.

That's exactly the sort of thing we've been seeing in the case of Wikileaks. And it could be the beginning of a new era on the Internet—one in which, sadly, the principle is that if you don't like what someone is saying, shut them down.

Congressmen are calling for the website Wikileaks to be shut down after it released thousands of secret U.S. government cables at the weekend. The cables feature blunt assessments of world leaders from diplomatic staff, and embarrassing details of espionage efforts. Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman has called on the Obama administration "to use all legal means necessary to shut down Wikileaks before it can do more damage by releasing additional cables."

It's a sentiment that many share, but it's also unlikely to work in practice. Think of how difficult it is to stop spammers or those distributing malware through websites. That requires proof that a site's activities are illegal within the hosting jurisdiction. The Internet Service Provider (ISP) hosting the site then has to be contacted, and it has to agree to shut the site down. A site can easily jump to a new ISP.

Wikileaks is currently hosted in Iceland, but it could easily move to another country. Mirror sites all over the world could copy the information on the main site and make it available even if they main site were shut down entirely. And Wikileaks data is also circulating through the file sharing service BitTorrent. Removing all copies of that data would be incredibly difficult, as the record industry is well aware.

Even operating outside of legal means, it would be hard to shut Wikileaks down. Hours before the release of a portion of the cables on Sunday, Wikileaks came under a denial of service attack. Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at network security company Arbor Networks, has posted an analysis of the attack, which he says didn't particularly harm Wikileaks' operations. The site simply changed its hosting location to cloud providers in Ireland and the U.S..

Any serious attempt to take Wikileaks offline is going to meet the difficulties inherent to the Internet's distributed, anarchic architecture. And that's exactly what Wikileaks' top activists are counting on.