Maher thinks back to his arrest in May. Agents let him go after he gave up the password — a fake one. Payback seems inevitable. In any case, he has a better plan in place this time: He has given one of his friends his password, with instructions to change it immediately if Maher is arrested. That way, even if Maher is broken by torture, he won't be able to give the authorities the information they need to take control of the April 6 network.
At a nearby police station, an officer makes a call to Cairo: "We have Ahmed Maher, sir." Soon Maher meets with prosecutors who lay out the charges: using Facebook to establish an illegal organization aiming to overthrow the regime and annul the constitution, funding and printing T-shirts that call for disruption of public peace, spreading rumors and tension to incite hatred of the government, gathering illegally, defaming the president and police, and disrupting traffic.
But Maher isn't tortured. No one can say why his treatment in custody is more lenient this time around. One possibility is that, lacking specific orders to beat or harm him, his captors in Alexandria just went easy.