So, which is it, Israel? Get your story straight

Netanyahu and his new Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces quoted today:

AFP - The Israeli military is "ready for all eventualities" as the Arab and Muslim world undergoes "an earthquake," Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday just days after Egypt's regime collapsed.

"An earthquake is shaking the whole Arab world and a large part of the Muslim world and we don't yet know how these things will turn out," the premier said at a swearing-in ceremony for new army chief Major General Benny Gantz.

Tsk, Tsk...politicians...

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Another Israeli website known for behind the scenes military analysis, debka.com:

"Friday night, Feb. 11, as Cairo's Tahrir Square rejoiced over Hosni Mubarak exit, Israel counted the cost of losing its most important strategic partner in the region.
Thirty-two years of peace with Egypt leave Israel militarily unprepared for the unknown and unexpected on their 270-kilometer long southern border: the current generation of Israeli combatants and commanders has no experience of desert combat, its armor is tailored for operation on its most hostile fronts: Iran, Lebanon's Hizballah and Syria; it is short of  intelligence on the Egyptian army and its commanders and, above all, no clue to the new rulers' intentions regarding Cairo's future relations with Israel and security on their Sinai border."

[But other than that, Israel's military is "ready for all eventualities"...-HM]

"The Israeli Defense Forces are trained and equipped to confront Iran and fight on the mountainous terrain of Lebanon and Syria. After signing peace with Egypt in 1979, Israel scrapped the combat brigades trained for desert warfare, whose last battle was fought in the 1973 war, and stopped treating the Egyptian army as a target of military intelligence. Israel's high command consequently knows little or nothing about any field commanders who might lead units if they were to be deployed in Sinai."

Si vis pacem para bellum, General Gantz...

Hosni Mubarak feels the double edged sword of the Internet in Egypt

Any repressive regime is damned if they have the internet, and damned if they don't...

Egypt cuts off the Internet Service Provider Noor during the Revolution...too late...

"So why did Hosni Mubarak give up on the government’s total information blackout? The answer should be a lesson for other Internet-unfriendly regimes: 


In any modern country, argues Lucie Morillon, the head of the Internet desk for Reporters Without Borders, (RSF) keeping millions of people offline simply isn’t a sustainable approach to quelling dissent. “There are very few countries in the worlds that can be cut off from the world’s economy for this long,” she says.


...Ultimately Egypt faces the same problem as any repressive regime in the digital era, one that University of Maryland Sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci calls the “Dictator’s Dilemma.” 


As she summarizes it, 'If they allow Internet to spread within the country, it poses a threat to their regime. If they don’t, they are cut off from the world–economically and socially.'"


From Forbes magazine blog, read on.

Tor use in Egypt during the last week, latest from Tor Blog

Tor use in Egypt spikes at onset of revolution...

"We're glad that the Internet Service Providers in Egypt are announcing their routes to the world and have rejoined the Internet. We are concerned because it is possible that traffic crossing the Egyptian border is being recorded and possibly saved for future use. Correctly using Tor to and from Egyptian destinations will keep your traffic anonymous.
Tor separates who you are from where you are going on the Internet. It's up to you, the user, to choose where you share your personal information. Currently, we do not try very hard to hide that you are using Tor. In the past few years, we haven't needed to hide. Tor looks like an SSL connection on the wire. Your local ISP, if they are very clever, could map your current connections from your assigned IP address to the list of public Tor relays. This would only tell them you are using Tor, not where you are going on the Internet. We do offer bridge relays, which are semi-public relays published in a few selective ways. By using bridges, your ISP is unlikely to figure out you are using Tor. We need thousands more bridges, please join the Tor network to help others.
Many years ago, we theorized this arms race could happen. Recent events have turned theory into reality. We are working on improvements to make it much more difficult to detect Tor usage. These methods include normalization of our TLS usage and tunneling Tor through other protocols, such as XMPP, HTTPS, and HTTP.
Thanks to some funding from Avaaz, we've also begun experimenting with ways to make Tor perform better on satellite and mesh networks. We have Tor working well on mobile phone 3G and 4G connections. Tor over VSAT and BGAN connections does work, however it needs more research into how to better handle the variable latencies and varying available bandwidth on such connections. The improvements that result from this research will benefit those with little to no Internet access, whether due to political unrest, natural disasters, or remote locations, who nonetheless seek to keep their online activities safe."


From the Tor Project Blog