Sandmonkey was determined to quit his blog. Sniping away at life and politics in Egypt had become too risky, he said, even under the cover of his anonymous online moniker. Too much of a chance the government thugs would hurt him or someone close to him, or smash his computer equipment. He wasn’t alone in his worry. The dozen or so bloggers who had gathered in the offices of a fledgling Cairo newspaper were freaked out by the four-year prison term given to a twenty-two-year-old former law school student for criticizing President Hosni Mubarak and for “religious incitement.” The blogger had called Mubarak “the symbol of tyranny” and said Muslims who attacked a Coptic Christian church had “revealed their true ugly face.” He had blasted Al-Azhar University, a revered center of Islamic learning, as “the other face of the coin of al Qaeda.” Some of the bloggers in the room disagreed with what he had written, but they didn’t expect a prison term. The muscular guy in a black T-shirt sitting beside me said that the authorities had already done all they can do to him, so he wasn’t worried. He said he would keep blogging, writing what he wants, showing up at dissident rallies. I was tempted to ask for specifics about what he had endured, but decided it was best that I didn’t.

I was in Cairo on a Knight fellowship from the International Center for Journalists, on leave from the Chicago Tribune, where I cover labor after years of roaming back and forth to the Middle East. I earned my first Middle Eastern credentials covering the Lebanon war in 1982, and my Arabic is still pretty good. The Washington-based center sends people like me around the world to help independent-minded journalists make a difference in...

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