The internet and social media were crucial for the success of the Tunisian revolution:

Here are additional details provided by Tunisian Internet Agency (French initials: ATI) director Kamel Saadaoui, in Wired:

“Saadaoui described the governmental oversight of the internet as an encrypted interface built and maintained by the ATI. Only the government can manipulate it.

“We gave them an interface where they can go in and add anything they want to block,” he says. “We don’t even know what they were banning because the list is encrypted. We can only see the number of blocked sites and some other technical aspects, such as CPO load, how much traffic … things like this. Sometimes we learn about the blocked sites when people call in and ask why their blog has been blocked. Then we know.”

At first, the regime banned around 300 websites, but as internet use grew throughout the country –- from 1 percent of the population in 2000 to 37 percent as of last November –- the blacklist bloated to more than 2,000. When the government started going after proxies, Saadaoui said, the number jumped to many thousands. He estimated that around a thousand of the blocked sites were political, and the rest were proxies.

The revolution began Dec. 17 in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, when 26-year-old fruit vendor Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest the humiliating tactics of local officials. The suicide jolted Tunisians. They began to protest in the streets — and clash with police.

Around 100 people died throughout the country. The media, controlled by Ben Ali’s advisers, reported only that criminals were looting.

But videos of the protests, riot police and their victims appeared on Facebook, and bloggers began reporting the daily events with first-hand accounts, photographs and videos. This information helped drive the uprising, and the government responded by allegedly hijacking Tunisian Facebook passwords.

At the same time, hackers began to attack the Tunisian government’s control over the internet. They bombed the ATI’s DNS and website, and tried to bomb the e-mail centipede gateway. The National Computer Security Agency — which fights hacking, phishing, viruses and fraud — took on the activists who tried to overload government websites with distributed denial-of-service attacks.

“When the hackers did DDOS they did a good job, and Anonymous did a good job,” Saadaoui says, smiling. “But not on everything. They weren’t able to take down the DNS, they weren’t able to take down the main servers or the network, but they were able to DDOS websites. They were able to bomb Ben Ali’s website.”