Strongly considering traveling to Egypt - advice needed

PappasArts said:
I wouldn't go unless you have contacts. My x-girlfriend is Egyptian and a major activist in Egypt; we communicated the day before it all rained down. She was offline after that when the government shut communications down, and is now transmitting from undisclosed locations. So unless you know what your doing and have solid contacts there, its best to not go. Also, there are already documentarians shooting that know the area as they are from the region and of course speak Arabic as well.

Michael Pappas
http://www.facebook.com/PappasArts
http://www.pbase.com/Arrfilms
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+1000! I am on the cell-phone with egypt since they turned off all comunication almost daily: dont go if you dont speak the language and have lots of friends there! They have enough problems without having to feel responsible for your safety ( which is a duty to a host there !). Plus you wouldnt recognize a police officer in galabija and make friends with the wrong guys in 5 minutes! Police abandoned the city and came back in plainsclothes to loot! They have the same STASI as DDR had!
Mubarak will go...a sack of rice will fall over in china....economy will crash....dont go, it´ll come to you... just keep your batteries charged... ;-)
 
It's in the news here too. Pretty big stuff going on. In a few places. Good to see 'your' internet is still working. ;)

Good to see you again greymog.

Rock on.
 
I was holding my tongue on this thread but seems like a good time for a reality check. Walking into a conflict zone takes a great deal of planning that takes months of preparation and you don't just stroll into one on a lark. Haiti had it's dangers but it was a natural disaster in our hemisphere with US NGO's and military. Political revolution in the middle east is well beyond that in its complexity. I can understand as filmmakers, the desire to use our skills to tell stories that move us, but it should be done out of sober analysis with specificity, not naive romanticism or a misplaced sense of exceptionalism that only we can tell the story.
 
Well, the US State Department just had an announcement that all US citizens should report to the closest airport immediately.

If you are willing to go to someplace that everyone else is looking to GTFO, then I guess you are a future Darwin Award Winner.
 
Well...he hasn't responded, so its more than likely that he's there. If so, best of luck and hope you got some great footage to make it worth the trip!

Kegan
 
Maybe he's one of these guys--
QAuHV.jpg



Necessity is the mother of invention.
 
Hunter007 said:
Well...he hasn't responded, so its more than likely that he's there. If so, best of luck and hope you got some great footage to make it worth the trip!

Kegan
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Hope not, because basically anyone speaking english or looking western isnt going down well right now. Al Jezeera has closed up office and has basically gone underground.
 
His last post was authoring this thread. I guess we can only assume that he did indeed go. Good luck, be safe, let us know what's going on when you can.
 
The Iraqi government was actually sending planes to evacuate people who had previously defected from Iraq to Egypt years ago, but now wanted to move back to Iraq. Where it's safer.
 
FWIW based upon working and traveling solo in Morrocco, Jordan, Lebanon, Mexico and a number of other countries that basically have nothing to do with one another...

Get a fixer. Someone local who is fluent in local language, custom, politics, etc and well as fluent (or somewhere approaching it) in English. This is the person who sets up your transportation (and/or does the driving) takes care of liaison with local gov't (to the degree that's possible) and being local will consistently read the situation around you faster and better than you will, and knows when to whisper in your ear okay, this is where we get in the car and leave. If you're going some place where driving through the wrong neighborhood can get you mauled, by all means travel with someone who knows which neighborhoods you must traverse hiding on the backseat/floor of the car...

The local expatriate community is a good place to link up with your fixer. They guy who walks up to you at the airport terminal and offers his services may be just the guy...but he might also be a local nudnick without whom you're better off, or that guy who cheerfully drives you straight to the most unsavory local criminal characters to hold for whatever they figure your ass turns out to be worth.

FWIW if you want to get ahead of the game, maybe consider spending a few weeks in Syria. There's lots of incredible stuff to see, and with a bit of luck (depending upon your definition of the word) perhaps within a few months it might be Damascus' turn...
 
s**t,

So I was sitting around going through DVXuser (I haven't posted in a while) and remembered most people probably think I'm dead...

I never made it to Cairo. I was working on getting a flight, but everything I found was going to take two days to get there. I worked pretty closely with Anon though and set up a Tor node locally to help keep Tor traffic flowing. Since I wasn't able to get there, I was on the official Anon IRC channel for nearly a week straight. Yes, the Anon hacktivist group, they do some messed up stuff, but for Egypt they pulled their weight hardcore. You know most of the stuff that happened there by now. But we had some Egyptians on the ground who were feeding us information and we were, in turn, sending that information pretty much everywhere. I was making copies of information myself. There were other people overseeing the DDoS attack on Egyptian state website, people recruiting others to get Tor nodes running. It was an intensive operation that took a lot of people to run effectively.

Since, I've been in touch with a few people I knew there, and everyone is okay. But the day I would have landed, they started attacking journalists. Snipers were taking out civilians with cameras. It was bad.

So I did what I could stateside. In all likelihood, I would have gotten my ass kicked. I stand out... I'm taller than most of the population, blonde hair, white. You could find me pretty easily. Plus, I'd need to get from the airport to Tahir square. Which would be a hike on foot if I wasn't able to find transport.

But frankly, I would have been there had I been able to get a flight that didn't take forever. I'm pretty sure no one that was working with Anon made it. Flights were really really hard to find. I know there were three people including myself that were working on getting flights.

I had a sat phone that was going to be donated, my laptop was set up, everything was ready to go. But the flight never came through for me.

So I was not able to make it. And I greatly apologize for going MIA here. I fell of the radar and only now did I realize this post was still chilling out.

I'm alive and well.
 
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Whew! Good to hear from you! :)

Glad to hear that you're safe and sound and that we don't need to start another RIP thread...

edit: I don't know nuttin' 'bout Tor nodes but I've seen a lotta tornados.
 
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