Protest This! - NYTimes.com CAIRO - On Monday evening, Mohammed Adel, of the April 6 Youth Movement, and Ali Esam, of the liberal Constitution Party, headed to the Kasr El Nil police station, a pink stucco villa on a leafy side street in central Cairo. They came bearing an official request to hold a protest ... against a protest law promulgated just the day before. The new law regulates, and in many cases criminalizes, demonstrations. It requires people who are planning a protest or a march to notify the nearest police station at least three days in advance, and indicate their points of departure and destination, as well as any slogans they intend to chant. The police may forbid the protest if they determine that it will "threaten peace and security." Half a dozen young police officers stood nervously at the entrance of the station, shouldering automatic rifles. Their superiors, gathered at the top of the stairs behind them, looked none too pleased. "This government's very legitimacy comes from demonstrations," Adel said to the small scrum of journalists and supporters on the street, referring to the mass uprising that unseated Mohamed Morsi, the Islamist president, last summer. This law is an insult to those who died calling for freedom of expression. The two activists then marched into the building and delivered their request. Their application dutifully included their planned slogans. One called the current government a "failure;" others mocked the police and the army. By Tuesday, the effects of the law were already in evidence. The police violently broke up two small unauthorized and peaceful protests. Seventy-four people were detained. A truck-load of female protesters was dumped in the desert on the outskirts of the city. The women claim they were beaten and sexual molested during their arrest. Before President Hosni Mubarak's ouster in early 2011, political protests consisted of a few hundred familiar faces, corralled by row upon row of police officers. After Mubarak's toppling, boisterous dissent swept the country. People took to the streets to demand trials, elections, changes in government, accountability for massacres. There was a wave of strikes. It seemed that at every institution - ministries, universities, hospitals, companies - lobbies and stairwells rang with chants and demands. Nearly three years later, many Egyptians are suffering protest-fatigue; they complain of blocked roads, traffic jams and street fights between young demonstrators and the police. But the new law goes well beyond penalizing violent or disruptive protests. It regulates any march or gathering of more than 10 persons. It forbids demonstrating near mosques, government buildings, military installations, hospitals, schools, airports and foreign missions. It makes it a crime - punishable by a fine of up to about $14,000 and five years in prison - for protesters to "violate general security, public order and productivity." And it authorizes the police to open fire on protesters who are demonstrating unlawfully when other means of dispersal, like water cannons or tear gas, fail. Every government in Egypt since February 2011 has tried to stamp out dissent while paying lip service to the people's right to express their will. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces passed an anti-protest law. The Muslim Brotherhood drafted another but, after fierce resistance, didn't issue it. And with every anti-protest law that is passed, the protests continue - and so, too, police violence against protesters. The latest law is aimed at supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, who continue to contest the military coup, despite facing deadly violence and sweeping arrests. It had been under discussion for some time and was passed Sunday despite the opposition of most political parties and human rights groups, and even some members of the government, who increasingly worry about the erosion of civil liberties. Adel and Esam will soon hear whether their application has been accepted by the Interior Ministry. Whatever the decision, they said, they plan to hold their protest on Dec. 1.