Mario Raefat, age 24, was there. Just after midnight, as the church was winding down its New Year’s Eve service, “there was a bang and something like an earthquake,” he said. “People were screaming. One of our priests said ‘don’t worry, don’t worry.’”

The priest tried to allay everyone’s fear with a simple explanation for the event.

“But, we were very sure it wasn’t like this,” said Raefat.

It was the beginning of a tumultuous year for everyone in Egypt, and before it was through the Coptic Church would experience additional attacks. Some Christians, fearful of what an Islamist government in Egypt may mean for them, are leaving the country. Others, like Hany Mikhail Botros, remain optimistic. Mikhail is a volunteer at The Two Saints Church, and a member of the Free Egyptians Party.

“This is my country,” he says, “and I love my country. I will spend all my life in it.”

He stands inside the church at the entrance to a memorial built for those who died in last year’s attack, while upstairs the congregation continues to sing and pray.

“I think it will be better (with the new government),” he says, although he admits that there may be fresh attacks on Christians in 2012. That is only because Hosni Mubarak left a legacy of hate, he explains. He believes that will go away with time.

Of course, not everyone is so sure. Father Mena Adel of Two Saints Church thinks that any new government could make living more difficult for Christians in Egypt. It could mean persecution ranging from higher taxes for Christians, to attacks on churches, to outright executions.

But, he said, “We hope all these ideas can’t carry out in the New Year.” In fact he has hope that Egypt will become better than before.

“Be glad in the New Year,” he says. “Also, try to live in peace and love with all our nations.”

It had been an emotional day for the group of about 60 protestors. Earlier, they had cause to celebrate when they restored some order to Tahrir Square. Although people refer to them as the Tahrir Square revolutionaries, very few members of the activist crowd remain at the square itself. There are some, but most have gone a few blocks down to occupy the Maglis Al-Shaab Street outside of the Cabinet Office. Even so, Tahrir Square had been closed to vehicle traffic for days. In the middle, people huddled on the bare ground beneath dirty blankets and tarpaulins between patches of garbage. But the people in this group are not revolutionists, according to Nermeen Ayad.

Ayad finds time to debate politics at an outdoor café with other activists, even though she has two children and a busy career as an Ophthalmologist. “We don’t know who they are,” she said. “They are making the revolution look bad in the media.” Ayad speaks with some authority. As an activist, she has been on the front lines of peaceful demonstrations and violent conflicts. As a doctor, she has treated the wounded.

Others went further in their accusations, claiming that the squatters were thugs and drug addicts paid by the SCAF to tarnish their movement. And so, on Saturday afternoon, a group of revolutionaries left their positions in front of parliament to clean up the mess. They ripped down tents and evicted squatters. It was fast. Yes, some scuffles occurred, but it happened in relative peace. The group removed barricades from the street, and vehicles poured into Tahrir Square once more with activists directing traffic.

So that was their victory. Later in the day, however, the Tahrir Square revolutionaries were in mourning. It was a sombre bunch back in front of the parliament buildings when they learned that Ahmed Mohmed Saleh, aged 21, finally succumbed to gunshot wounds that he sustained in street battles on Mohamed Mahmoud Street in late November. Those battles claimed many lives. They cost dozens more their vision in at least one eye. In addition to teargas, the military used birdshot and rubber bullets on protestors. Since then, it is common to see demonstrators wearing eye patches of white gauze as they patrol the street in front of the Prime Minister’s office, a street that they have effectively closed off.

It was this group, on a roller coaster of emotion, that suddenly found themselves late at night with an enemy in their midst. The man in custody on the other side of those canvass walls, with a mob of people pressed around him, he was not only a spy. He was a murderer.

He had infiltrated the group posing as a doctor, said Ghadah Kamal. Her voice had gone hoarse from the teargas, she said, but I suspect it was more from shouting. The “doctor” was really a police informant, she explained. During fights with authorities he had administered injections to wounded protestors. Whether or not it was intentional – he was not a real doctor – the man introduced air into the bloodstreams of his victims, killing at least one person. This was the consensus of the crowd.

I wondered out loud what the mob might do to this man.

“They will tie him to a tree,” Kamal said with a smile. “That was my idea.”

Finally, around one o’clock in the morning, the group left the tent with their prisoner. People pressed around him so that it was difficult to see, but when I got near I found that he was crying. Physically he looked all right – there were no cuts or bruises on his face, at least – but his eyes darted about looking for some kind of hope. Obviously, he understood that he was in danger, but he didn’t know how much.

In the end, they tied him to a tree like they planned, but the rope was mostly symbolic. The man would not have dared an escape. One protestor from the crowd, wearing a gauze eye patch, snaked through close enough to land a punch on the prisoner’s head, but he was sharply rebuked. It seemed that, after all, there would be no real violence done to this man.

Another protestor, a young leader, offered the prisoner water. The man must have been asthmatic, because his captors occasionally held an inhaler to his lips to give him medicine. For an angry mob that had lost one of their own earlier that day, they seemed very civil. After being lashed to the tree for a few hours, the man was eventually released. Apparently, the Tahrir Square revolutionaries understand that they have a reputation to uphold.

Kamal agrees that the Independents for Change, or whatever you wish to call them, need to win public trust back.

“Right now we are a small group,” she says. “Like Che (Guevara).” Behind her, a charcoal sketch of Che wearing an eye patch illustrates her point.

And like Che, Kamal and her small group are ready to fight.

“What would satisfy you?” I ask. “What can the government do now to get you to leave peacefully?”

“We will leave when the SCAF leaves,” she says. But, she admits, that is unlikely. No, the police will come, she says, and when they do, we will fight.

The young revolutionaries won the right to vote, but few of them bother now because there is no one running in elections that they trust.

“The people running for government are the ones who killed us in Mohamed Mahmoud Street,” says Kamal. “How can we vote for them?”

But there is another skirmish taking place in which activists have demonstrated an ability to punch above their weight. It is the war to win public support, and part of this battle is fought online.

I sat down with a leading opposition player in this struggle, an Internet Army Commander of sorts. Kardokh is a good-looking young man who speaks four languages. He is neatly dressed in a black suit jacket. He keeps glancing at his computer while we speak, as messages from other activists pour into his Facebook account. We first met in Damascus, but on this day we connected in Beirut as he recently fled the country.

Kardokh managed to cross the border after a shadowy benefactor, a man with connections to both the activist community and the Mukhabarat who pursue them, paid to have his name cleared from the “Black List.”

“It cost $1,000 to have my name removed so they wouldn’t stop me at the border,” explains Kardokh. He smiled. “But it’s back on the list now.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“Because they attacked my house again yesterday.”

For the Syrian regime, Kardokh is a high-priority target, even if they don’t exactly know why.

“They know I do the bad things,” said Kardokh “but they don’t know what I do.”

That’s because Kardokh – along with a close group of lawyers, activists, and journalists – have been very careful, right from the start. They know that if anyone of the group ends up in custody, then the whole web may break.

“That’s really why I left,” said Kardokh. “It was better for everyone.”

With his background in programming and Internet security, he is effectively the keystone to their system of anonymity.

Kardokh won scholarships to fund his education in technology. After graduation, he plied his trade for a private company in plain view of the Syrian regime, but when members of the security forces tried to recruit him to monitor the online activity of his countrymen, Kardokh became a marked man.

“That’s because I refused,” he explained. “They didn’t like that.” He turned down their offer of $1,500 per month, a large sum for Syrians. Then he ignored their veiled threats. Then he was arrested.

After that, Kardokh threw his weight behind the activist cause, teaching them about encrypted browsers and files and how to communicate safely. He has remote access to many of their computers so that he can upgrade their systems from Lebanon.

“We know exactly what the regime can see,” said Kardokh with a mischievous smile. They use Blue Coat technology to monitor and filter Internet activity, he explained. Blue Coat is an American system that the Syrians probably acquired illegally from Iraq. But they no longer receive the necessary code and filter updates. They have the hardware, but they can’t fix the bugs.

Kardokh’s eyes brightened when he said this and he smiled, waiting for everything to sink in. Except, I don’t know very much about computers, so I just nodded.

“We know everything,” he exclaimed.

Kardokh had cracked into their system through a portal that the regime can no longer close. He can tell what information they have, what searches they do, and he can, quite literally, read their mail.

The regime is still very strong, Kardokh admitted, but they have long ago lost the cyber war aspect of this fight.

“What about the Syrian Electronic Army?” I asked. I had read about this sophisticated team of hackers that interfered with websites and Facebook accounts.

Kardokh knew them well. They had attacked a website he built that keeps track of every fatality, every arrest, every disappearance in Syria since the revolution began. The website, vdc-sy.org, gets over one million visits per month and includes users such as human rights groups, high profile media outlets, and even the United Nations. When the Syrian Electronic Army attacked the site, “We stopped them,” Kardokh says simply.

After all, “They are children,” he says. “They are playing with toy computers.”