Catching up on the action in Tunisia and Egypt

   In Tunisia, protesters had previously sought to start protests, but they fizzled. They tried again after the self-immolation of a street vendor in the city of  Sidi Bouzid.  "The key difference in Sidi Bouzid was that locals fought to get news of what was happening out, and succeeded.  'We could protest for two years here, but without videos no one would take any notice of us,' Horchani said." [http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/features/2011/01/2011126121815985483.html]
   In Egypt President Mubarak, in power for the last 30 years, never allowed any party but his to gain any actual power.  So the current opposition, mainly young people using ICA, has simply bypassed the small opposition groups that do exist and taken revolution on themselves.  Loosely connected people on the internet are much harder to corral than a small political party.
“'It was the young people who took the initiative and set the date and decided to go,' Mohamed ElBaradei, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Wednesday with some surprise during a telephone interview from his office in Vienna, shortly before rushing home to Cairo to join the revolt."[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/27/world/middleeast/27opposition.html?partner=rss&emc=rss]
When Egypt shut down the Internet in an attempt to thwart protests, people began using faxes instead.  A group called Telecomix began helping by forwarding messages sent via shortwave radio.  People in Egypt could still connect to the Internet via modems dialed to foreign connections.  Anonymous provided phone numbers of foreign providers for Internet connections. This is the opposite of their Ddos attacks on businesses that refused services to Wikileaks.
Wikileaks, meanwhile, decided it was an opportune time for them to dump their "cablegate" information about Egypt [http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/27/nyt-wikileaks-cables.html].
ICA has helped protesters in Tunisia and Egypt, but even when the Internet is removed, there are still ways to communicate and organize.