What Happens when Eighty Million Egyptians Disappear?
UPDATE: It's hard not to speculate on the political implications as events unfold. Protestors are defying curfew, police are using violent and aggressive tactics in the street, soldiers are being greeted with flowers. It's difficult to understate the significance of what is happening in Egypt right now. Likely no one - not the protestors, the government, nor the observers on the outside - knows where this is headed. Landlines, of course, are still up. People are using them to continue to access the outside world, through voice and dialup. Protesters are spreading the news through Twitter, phone calls, word of mouth. Al-Jazeera is broadcasting live - its earlier reticence long forgotten. There's almost too much to keep up with. The technology at this point is a documentary tool for history - the momentum is offline.
POST: With so much at stake in Egypt, and so much happening so quickly, its difficult to know where to begin. Since I began writing this, Egypt appears to have taken a nation of 80m people offline. Over the past 48 hours, the Egyptian government escalated from censoring websites, to blocking mobile service, and as of Thursday evening, took the unprecedented step of disconnecting Egypt from the global Internet. The events of today - Friday - are critical to the future of the Egyptian regime and the will of the Egyptian people.
Again, as technology blog, I will leave the politics to the experts - but some quick context. Where did this come from? Calls on Facebook for a 'Day of Rage' - recognizing the national "Police Day" holiday with protests against injustice and corruption - have burgeoned into vast and surging protests across the country, including the capital city of Cairo and the Mediterranean city of Alexandria. The industrial city of Suez, on the northern shores of the Gulf of Suez, has been wracked by violent and relentless street fighting between protesters and central security.
These events in Egypt have unfolded further and faster than anyone would have predicted. Previous calls for national protests have delivered very little. This time, fuelled by recent domestic outrages, including the death of activist Khalid Said at the hands of the police, and the blatant manipulation of November's parliamentary elections, things were different. Fanned by the Sidi Bouzid uprising in Tunisia, and saturated by unprecedented and revolutionary media, something combustible sparked.
Egypt boasts some of the highest rates of mobile internet access and fastest internet speeds in the Middle East. This has enabled the enthusiastic and largely apolitical embrace of of social networks, blogs, and forums; as a result, a highly-connected generation has emerged, accustomed to instant information and access. (A quick scan of self-identified residents of Egypt on Facebook puts the number at 5 million - it is likely greater). This environment nurtured one of the more robust communities of digital activists in the region, and in recent years the government has sought to maintain a precarious balance - arresting and intimidating bloggers while allowing a degree of online debate. The regime's critical challenge was to keep activism on the internet and out of the streets.
This balance seems to have been fatally upset this week. While the state-run media published articles on political protests in Lebanon, thousands took to the streets on Tuesday the 25th. Even Al-Jazeera was caught unprepared - or uncharacteristically reluctant - to adequately cover the protests. The government, by contrast, had been studying the lessons of Tunisia. Bussing among cities with strong labor organizations, including the 'labor stronghold' of Mahalla, the flashpoint for the April 6 movement, was shut down. The industrial city of Suez, already labeled "Egyptian Sidi Bouzid" has suffered from communications blackout as street fighting has raged on
Throughout the 25th, and the 26th, the internet played much the same role as in recent unrest in Tunisia, sharing media, video, and photos of events. Protesters continued to use social media for coordinating - again, from contacts on the ground, "the organizers of the demonstration have been savvy, communicating fake gathering spots and timings on Facebook and then revealing alternate plans shortly before taking action."
A quirk of the region is that, aside from Facebook, the most popular community sites are old fashioned forums, particularly those used for discussing sports - and even more specifically, those used for discussing the merits of various football clubs. (In Egypt, that's Ahly v. Zamalek). In recent weeks, these otherwise innocuous communities have become political and organizing forums. According to our source, these have provided cover for exchange "between Egyptian and Tunisian activists, with the Tunisians providing advice on how to avoid tear gas and confuse security forces."
As recently as September 2010, there was no significant censorship on Egyptian websites, according to the alkasir.org circumvention project. Instead, according to the Freedom House 2009 Freedom on the Net Report:
Egypt does not engage in widespread censorship of the internet and the government has actively encouraged access to technology. But security services and their allies are known to monitor users and use low-tech methods of control such as intimidation, detention, imprisonment, and torture to silence online activists.
Or, as the Interior Minister explained to the US Ambassador, the government must respond when "people are offended by blogs".
When protests moved on the streets, and proved more durable than in the past, the government changed tactics. NDI contacts in Cairo reported that as of Thursday, January 27th:
A cyber war is taking place in parallel to the protests on the ground. Twitter and Facebook are currently disabled, however people have been using proxies to access banned websites. Internet connections have failed sporadically over the last two days as well, and there have been rumors that the Internet will be blocked prior to Friday’s protests.
The independent English-language Egyptian paper, Al Masry Al Youm, reports that this disruption had been planned well in advance, by a regime that learned its lessons from Tunisia. The regime had planned to make internet look accidental, but reportedly ran out of time.
Bloggers and the independent media have done their parts to support protesters offline, posting Arabic and English language resources on how to stay safe in street conflict. In a striking reflection on the internet's power as a tool for activists and repressors alike, one guide was distributed physically all over Cairo, with explicit instructions not to post its contents online - it contains suggested marching routes, instructions on how to protect from tear gas, and advice for language intended to flip security forces to the sides of the protestors. It was shared clandestinely among activists in PDF form for hours before the embargo was eventually broken. (No, I won't link to it. The Atlantic posted and translated the whole thing if you want to Google.)
As early as Tuesday afternoon, protesters were reporting localized blackouts of mobile service in addition to web disruption. Egypt has a worrisome record in this regard - as recently as 2008, the government coerced Vodafone into providing account records for phones used to organize bread protests, reportedly by threatening to suspend the company's license. (22 people were later arrested for their roles in the protests). It's not just Vodafone - As of Thursday evening, there were reports that the three major mobile phone companies had suspended SMS service at the behest of the government. Under growing public scrutiny, Vodafone confirmed the cuts:
All mobile operators in Egypt have been instructed to suspend services in selected areas. Under Egyptian legislation the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it. The Egyptian authorities will be clarifying the situation in due course.
SMS and Blackberry Messenger have been reported down as well. There were some reports of continued data connections through foreign provider SIMs running on partner networks, but these have been difficult to confirm conclusively. Citizens have resorted to communal resources, calling for shops and residents using WiFi in the areas of greatest protests to unlock networks, so protesters could use them to access the Internet and share news in the absence of mobile networks.
And then things continued to get worse. At 12:34am, in an act unparalleled in the history of the Internet, Egypt appeared to cut off access to the outside world. With the exception of Noor, a small ISP that serves the Egyptian stock market (down nearly 11%, or $12bn since the protests began), Egypt seems to be unplugged. Nothing like this has ever happened - in Iran in 2009, the internet was choked to minimum usability, in Tunisia it was aggressively censored and activist accounts hacked. Disconnecting an entire country - one with a large economy dependent on information exchange - has no precedent. It was as if Egypt was wiped from the earth - and utterly disconcerting. Skype contacts snuffed out. Reports and tweets came in from communities like Meedan, asking where their colleagues had suddenly gone.
Jacob Appelbaum, who had been running a serious of diagnostic tests on TE Data, the primary pipe, reported losing all servers in Cairo. All sites with .eg domains were wiped off the web. The undersea cables, including backbone SEABONE, between Italy and Egypt, remained physically intact. Traffic crossing the critical bridge from Africa to Asia via Sinai also appeared unaffected. Danny at the Committee for the Protection on Journalists confirms reports that some of the five star hotels and private organizations are still online. As of the first hours of this morning, there were reports of limited restored service - these are unconfirmed. As of now, the only independent way for information to flow in and out of Egypt is over dedicated satellite uplinks, of the kind most commonly associated with embassies media, and government installations.
And, well - apparently people are using old-fashioned ham radios. It turns out that when 80 million people are silenced, they make quite a large noise.
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More good, human-readable explanations on how the government shut off the world at GigaOM.
