By Joe Mansour

Anxiously following the protests riling authoritarian regimes across the Middle East and North Africa, I’ve been struck by the cat-and-mouse game over communications technology played between youthful protesters and entrenched regimes struggling to maintain their grips on power.

After the ouster of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, the lesson other dictators apparently have learned from Egypt’s uprising, is to: 1) Crack down quickly and violently on protesters; and 2) control the flow of information by completely shutting off access to the outside world.

This is the exact response of Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi, who has turned off the country’s Internet access and barred any foreign news agencies from reporting in Libya. With no professional journalists to report the news and almost no Internet access, Libyan protesters have turned to their mobile phones, effectively becoming citizen journalists.

Mobile’s ubiquity in Libya makes it even more relevant. Internet penetration in Libya stands at just 5.5 percent, but nearly 78 percent of Libyans have mobile phone subscriptions.

Camera phones have powered protests before, such as sparking the June 2009 protests in Iran with video of the shooting death of a young woman that galvanized the Iranian opposition. However, in Libya grainy video from camera phones is the ONLY method protesters have to document their uprising.

That being the case, I would argue that the Libyan people are winning the information war, if not the battle in the streets against the Gadhafi regime.

Hopefully the lesson other despots learn from Libya is the futility of attempting to silence their own people in a digital age where every protester can document his or her struggle for freedom with just a camera phone.

Mansour is an account director for the David All Group and has experience helping foreign governments hold authentic conversations with their people online.