HOW GAYEGYPT.COM AND ( INADVERTENTLY ) LE MONDE TOGETHER CONNED EGYPTIAN STATE SECURITY. Posted 21 March 2004 We can tell this story as over two years have gone by since this "crime" took place. The Egyptian sex police and Egyptian state security must, by now, have belatedly realized that the thousands of man hours they have poured into cracking the GayEgypt.com code will never bring them the arrests they crave. Besides, a few months ago, we stopped running the coded messages. So why had we run them. Back in March 2002, as the risk of internet entrapment grew, we had taken a reluctant decision to bar Egyptians from advertising on our Egypt personals page. But we were annoyed that Egyptian state security had forced us into such an act of self censorship and we wanted to get even. So we decided to give the impression that we were posting future personal ads in code and a few days later the most prestitious perhaps of all French newspapers, Le Monde, gave our elaborate hoax added credibility by running a front page story on the new coded personals (12 March 2002). According to a reliable source, a senior Egyptian official, then in Paris, relayed this information back to Cairo and, apparently, Mubarak himself sent orders that the code must be cracked and the advertisers arrested. Some of the best Egyptian cryptologists were set to task to break the code, and after three weeks all the experts in this group was sacked (we cannot disclose exact details.) Only after months of fruitless work by their successors, was the code-breaking effort scaled back. What Egyptian State Security never knew was that the code, though carefully based on a cryptology text book, was completely fake. There were no real personal ads. Just fake ones. The text book itself was borrowed from a small London library. In the back of the book we found a series of exercises and we copied out those that had been set for the most advanced students. However, in order to make the code, truly unbreakable, we then changed about 10 percent of the letters. And we used one short paragraph of this complex but corrupted code for each fake personal ad we posted. It was just an amusing and somewhat desperate attempt to divert police resources that might have otherwise been engaged in internet entrapment or other strategies of surveillance and repression. Only with the inadvertent help of Le Monde, did this somewhat childish prank actually succeed in striking a blow against Egypt's bureaucracy of repression. Latest news 22 May 2012: Cairo psychiatrist claims he can "cure" 70 to 75 per cent of gay teenagers.