[1] El-Hamalawy started working as a journalist in 2002 for the English language Cairo Times, where he covered protests, trials of dissidents and police torture news.

[9] El-Hamalawy was detained and tortured by deposed Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak's State Security Investigations Service (SSI) in 2000, allegedly with the institution's complicity.

As a result, he was refused employment as a professor by Egyptian universities and he was banned from entering the AUC campus for a year after he finished his MA in 2002.

[10] In May 2002, he was detained and held at the local Nasr City SS office, during a crackdown on leftist activists prior to planned pro-Palestine protests on the Nakba anniversary.

[11] On 20 March 2003, he attended a demonstration in Tahrir Square protesting the US invasion of Iraq and was allegedly beaten by Egyptian security forces dispersing the rally.

Thousands of residents including the urban poor, unemployed youth, and other workers joined the street demonstrations, protesting Mubarak, suspected corruption in his government, and price inflation.

El-Hamalawy stated that "The demonstrators were met with police tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition," and at least two men were killed.

[18] Bloggers and citizen journalists (including el-Hamalawi, Wael Abbas, Alaa Abd El-Fattah and others) used Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, blogs and other social media tools to report on the strike, alert their networks about police activity, organize legal protection and draw attention to their efforts.

He views social media as a means of publicly communicating to the outside world abuses carried out by the Egyptian authorities as well as street protests against the government.

Despite the popularity of el-Hamalawy's blog, only a minority of his readers are working class Egyptians due to the lack of internet access in the country and because most of his posts are written in English.

El-Hamalawy believes it is because of his independence from any editorial hierarchy, that he, among other bloggers, was able to regularly document and publish allegations of torture by the Egyptian authorities and the increasing occurrence of sexual harassment and assault in Egypt.

On that first day of protest, el-Hamalawy stated to Al-Jazeera that the demonstrations were "necessary to send a message to the Egyptian regime that Mubarak is no different than Ben Ali and we want him to leave too."

Tunisian president Zine el-Abedine Ben Ali had been previously overthrown on 18 January as a result of mass popular protests against his government.

"[26] After the fall of Mubarak during the revolution, el-Hamalawy was among many protesters who stormed and seized the offices of the State Security Investigations Service (SSI) in Nasr City and was able to visit the cell where he had been imprisoned, later writing on his Twitter feed that he could not stop crying.

[33] He claimed several cases of torture by the military police towards the demonstrators and about the attacks to uncover virginity, which were widely raised in Egyptian public opinion afterward.

[34][35] El-Hamalawy had also criticized the lack of transparency regarding military finances, stating "any institution in the country that takes taxes from us should be open to question.

El-Hamalawy claims that, historically, Arab dictatorships have not positively contributed to the Palestinian cause and are in fact hypocritical, since they solely act on their own personal interests.

Unlike other Arab leftists, he does not fear a weakening of relations between Syria and the militant opposition against Israel stating "the future of the resistance depends on the Syrian people, who are anti-Zionist in their majority."

[42] El-Hamalawy has criticized the newly appointed Justice Minister Mohamed Abdel Aziz el-Gendy, for his ties to deposed president Mubarak, in relation to the freezing of assets of the ousted dictator.

He said: "I mean, the workers in some sectors are still facing the old managers, who are trying to sabotage their attempts to establish independent unions and the national minimum wage.

[49] Although el-Hamalawy opposes Islamism as an ideology, during times of war, he regarded Lebanese and Islamist groups Hezbollah and Hamas, to be defending their respective countries, playing an anti-imperialist role.