Mukhabarat 2.0?

For a little pre-weekend amusement I should call your attention to this post at The Arabist. Somebody has registered a Twitter account called "statesecurity" and now there's one in the name of Habib al-Adly, complete with a picture of Egypt's powerful Minister of the Interior. "ElAdly" and "statesecurity" are commenting to each other. And "ElAdly's" Twitter page even links to the actual Ministry of the Interior website.

I think this shows (as The Arabist's post title "Web 2.0 silliness" indicates) that young, Web-savvy Egyptians retain the national ability to make fun of their government, even its security apparatus. I hardly think State Security Investigations, Egypt's powerful internal security agency, will start to tweet on Twitter, since their whole modus operandi is keeping you in the dark about what they're doing. Egyptians have always been willing to make fun of their government institutions (and clever and genuinely funny about it at times).

And "statesecurity" is apparently now identified. If any of these links don't work in a day or two it will be because Twitter caught on, but meanwhile, Bravo. Of course, given the fact that a couple of Egyptian bloggers have actually been arrested in the past year, I hope the clever folks behind these sites watch themselves.