Twitter your way to freedom
Held by Egyptian Authorities? Time to ‘Tweet’
James Karl Buck says he has Twitter to thank for his freedom.
Buck, a journalism grad student, was arrested in Egypt last week, and his only communication to the outside world was through his cellphone, which he used to post a message on the micro-blogging site.
“Arrested,” he typed into his phone, a message that broadcast via the Web to his friends in the United States and bloggers in Egypt.
Buck was detained after photographing a labor rally near a textile mill in Mahalla, a few hours from Cairo, the capital. The grounds for his arrest were not made clear to him, he said, though the men who detained him said he may have been inciting a riot.
After Buck, who was in Egypt for a school research project, sent a tweet that he had been detained, his friends contacted the U.S. Embassy and his school, the University of California at Berkeley, which sent a lawyer to get him out of jail.
A spokeswoman for the State Department said yesterday that the agency helped secure Buck’s release. </em>
