A more fitting debut could not have been conceived for the new feature documentary “How to Start a Revolution,” given its world premiere on September 18th as part of the 27th annual Boston Film Festival. In attendance were the director, Ruaridh Arrow, as well as a few of the people featured in the film: Robert Helvey, Jamila Raqib, and the man himself, Gene Sharp. At 83 years old and with rather limited mobility, Dr. Sharp  rarely makes public appearances these days. But the several hundred who had turned out to see him in Boston were by no means disappointed, responding with at least three standing ovations on the afternoon. For those of us lucky enough to have been there and hear him speak, including a number of his close friends and colleagues, it was impossible not to recognize the deep significance of the moment, with the humble Dr. Sharp visibly moved by the outpouring of support.

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Many of us who aren’t in Egypt these past couple of weeks feel a certain amount of solidarity with a people trying to depose an undemocratically elected, US-backed regime, which for the last thirty years has seemed monolithic.  According to the an article in Sunday’s New York Times, the Al Jazeera English live stream from Egypt had been viewed 1.6 million times in the United States since Friday.  The service’s online head Mohamed Nanabhay declared it “a testament to the fact that Americans do care about foreign news.”  But while a lot of us are staying tuned to the events in Cairo, Alexandria, and elsewhere, a handful of people actually came up with ways to help out.

After working with a team of engineers, a Google product manager along with the co-founder of a voice message distribution company called SayNow announced over the weekend “the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.”  The Twitter page for the new service, @speak2tweet, instructs us to “Click the link in each tweet to hear a voice tweet from folks inside Egypt. Call +16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855 to leave a tweet and hear tweets.”  With the exception of a few too many instances of the word “tweet,” this is all pretty exciting stuff.

The service was designed to circumvent the Internet blackout imposed by the Mubarak regime since Thursday of last week.  With many of Egypt’s cell phone providers also shut down, it’s taken advantage of the fact that landline phones still work, allowing people to continue getting their voices heard, both domestically and around the world.  So while no Internet access is required to use the new service, a landline phone is, along with the ability to call internationally as the numbers listed are from the US, Italy, and Bahrain, respectively.  The way it works is that someone calls, leaves a voice message, and a link instantly gets posted to Twitter complete with the hashtag #Egypt, which when clicked plays the person’s original message, hosted on the SayNow website.

The messages are understandably most often in Arabic, but it would seem the potential is there for automatic transcription and translation into English, by combining some of the features of, say, Google Voice and Google Translate.  And in addition to word reaching outside of Egypt, those inside the country can hear the messages as well, simply by calling the very same numbers listed above.  It seems like a novel way to get around the digital darkness, coupled with similar efforts by people like UCLA grad student John Scott-Railton, and a European organization named Telecomix that’s been working to provide free European dial-up access to people in Egypt.

Awareness and support from the international community are not necessary ingredients for nonviolence to work, but oftentimes they do help a great deal.  As we become more and more reliant upon certain technology we need to think about what to do when access to that technology is blocked.  The strategists of any good nonviolent movement need to be able to think many steps in advance, formulating contingency plan upon contingency plan in anticipation of serious oppression.  The unfolding Egyptian revolution is forcing us to come to grips with the inevitable question: “What do we do when an oppressive government completely cuts off access to the Internet?”  To see people coming up with solutions on the fly is heartening, and if we pay attention, may even help us gain insight into what might work in places where uncensored Internet access has never been widespread: China, Burma, or even North Korea.  Depending on how big we’re willing to think, the ongoing events in Egypt may hold a great many lessons for us indeed.

In today’s marketplace, as more and more people conduct their business online, some methods of protest traditionally open to the public are becoming less and less of an option. If an online retailer, for instance, engages in action or holds a position some of us feel compelled to oppose, many times there’s no central location to converge upon in order to publicly register our disapproval.

As business evolves in the digital age, forms of protest need to evolve as well, running the full gamut from consciousness-raising efforts and boycotts to nonviolent subversion, intervention, and civil disobedience. Thanks to the recent campaign by the hacktivist group Anonymous, the website-blocking technique known as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) has once again been thrust into the mainstream, opening itself to evaluation and potential adoption by a growing community of online activists.

The campaign was aimed at the websites of PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, and Amazon.com, some of which were temporarily rendered inaccessible through servers being flooded with more requests than they were able to handle. That this was a form of protest is undeniable, as the group was explicit about it being in response to those companies bowing to US pressure and severing ties to WikiLeaks. Whether or not it should be considered civil disobedience, however, has been a subject of much debate, and for good reason. With government and business colluding to co-opt the Internet as a neutral forum for free speech, conscientious citizens everywhere must be prepared to react.

One of the most powerful ways we can do so is through the time-tested method of civil disobedience. It’s fitting, of course, that protesting for Internet freedom take place online. Oftentimes, in nonviolence theory, the more related the method of protest to that which is being protested, the better. In addition, when the issues at stake have such global implications, it only makes sense to select a form of protest in which people around the world can participate.

Of utmost importance, however, when attempting to rally public opinion, is that a clear distinction be drawn between criminal and civil disobedience. By showing respect for the law even while breaking the law, it becomes difficult for an act of online defiance to either be brushed off as a prank or condemned as cyber-terrorism. If we examine the Anonymous campaign in this light, we should be able to see whether or not it represents a valid model for future action.

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Since the recent passage of Arizona Senate Bill 1070, scheduled to go into effect on July 29, those of us working for social justice in the United States have a rare opportunity to register a particularly effective form of protest.  The inherently unjust nature of this legislation presents conscientious individuals with a real chance to go back to what many might say civil disobedience was originally intended to do: promote the repeal of an unjust law by openly and nonviolently breaking the law itself.

This is what has come to be known today as direct civil disobedience.  It is distinguished from indirect civil disobedience, where the law being broken is not itself the target of the protest.  Not many would argue, for instance, that a law prohibiting people from sitting in the middle of the street is unjust.  When used to draw attention to an issue of social importance, however, violating this law with a willingness to accept the consequences may be an effective tool.  Although the merit of such tactics can vary depending on any number of factors, to score a direct protest by violating an unjust law is very likely to be viewed as more legitimate.

The distinction is useful because in recent years we in the United States haven’t had to worry much about severely repressive, overtly dictatorial laws.  Not so very long ago, in certain parts of the country, violating an unjust law was as simple as ordering food at a lunch counter, sitting near the front on a city bus, or going swimming at a public beach.  More common in the US today we find people courting arrest by blocking entrances to buildings, occupying government offices, or chaining themselves to fences, seeking to address an injustice more or less unrelated to the law actually being transgressed.  Since these injustices don’t always allow for direct, public defiance, we try to create that tenuous link between issue and protest method as best we can.  But while indirect civil disobedience always beats inaction, from a strategic standpoint, if the opportunity is there, direct beats indirect every time.  And with this new Arizona law, the opportunity is definitely there.

Indeed, not since the end of the draft in 1973 has there been a law in the United States that seems to render itself so well to direct civil disobedience.  Arizona SB 1070 requires non-citizens to keep registration documents on them at all times, and forces police officers to inquire about immigration status during any kind of arrest or routine stop if they encounter “reasonable suspicion” that the person might be in the country illegally.  In addition, the new law gives police leeway to arrest someone solely on the basis of there being probable cause that they may be undocumented, at which point they’re to be turned over directly to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

This basically boils down to the police in Arizona having new license to stop anyone looking remotely Hispanic – for no other reason than that they look remotely Hispanic – demand papers from them, and take them into custody if satisfactory documents are not immediately produced.  Predictably this has led some people, such as Roman Catholic Archbishop Roger Mahony, to draw parallels to the lives of those in Europe forced to live under the Nazi régime.  Additionally – and this concerns all of us – the new Arizona law makes it a crime to “transport or move”, or “conceal, harbor or shield” undocumented immigrants, reminding me more of something out of the Fugitive Slave Acts from this country’s dark past.  Against such blatantly unjust, potentially far-reaching legislation, at least we’re armed with a chance for everyone to participate in its direct disobedience, instead of just abandoning our undocumented brothers and sisters to their fate.

In a relatively short amount of time, Martin Luther King, Jr. became somewhat of an expert on unjust laws.  In a speech he delivered before the Fellowship of the Concerned in 1961, King defined an unjust law as “a code that the majority inflicts upon the minority, which that minority had no part in enacting or creating, because that minority had no right to vote in many instances.”  Although close to 50 years old, this definition holds up in modern-day Arizona quite well.  The undocumented minority, having virtually no recourse to its voice being heard, is at the mercy of the majority – in this case that of the Arizona Senate – 60 percent Republican, and 100 percent white.

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