Egypt Showed The World How Easy It Is To Shut Down Connectivity

Philip M. Stone February 3, 2011 Follow on Twitter

So now we know that governments really can shut down the Internet when they want to. Can you imagine not being able to receive or send email for a day or be able to Twitter or access Facebook let alone for the five days that Egyptians couldn’t? And how do you use your mobile phone when those services are switched off? The Egyptian street demonstrations showed the fragility of the communications that have become democracy’s lifeblood.

Egypt restored Internet access Wednesday after cutting it for five days. Finally people were once able to connect with one another. It was that connectivity that really had worried the Egyptian authorities at the beginning of the protests for no army or police could successfully defeat that most powerful force – connectivity – that enables people to quickly organize and change their world.

Actually the comms battle was won by the civil servants who astounded the world by showing just how easy it was for Egypt to cut itself off the way it did.   It’s not that there was some magic switch that did the job, but rather the powers that be merely told the five main Internet providers to cut off their services, which they did, and some 23 million Egyptians were back in the dark ages.

Mobile phones also got cut off.  Suddenly the Twitterers and social media users for the most part were out of business which is what the authorities really wanted for it was the social networks that have the global let alone local ability to instantly spread the word.

What really is worrying is that there are other governments around the world that will have watched and learned from what the Egyptian authorities pulled off; something to make part of their strategy if such protests hit their streets. And even though many world leaders urged the Egyptians immediately to restore links those demands fell on deaf ears. The Egyptian authorities understood very well that street protesters used the Internet, social media and the like to organize themselves and there was no way the authorities were going to give those protesters the logistical tools they desperately needed. It was civil warfare fought at a very different level.

So, what do you do if you’re organizing street events and you lose your electronic communications? Apparently it was back to print – fliers quickly circulated telling Egyptians about the next day’s demonstrations. While the government was able to shut down electronic communicating, it was not able to shut down all ways of communicating information to large numbers and the fact so many turned out for the Tuesday rallies across the country showed that the word still got out – no doubt international Arabic language news stations had something to do with that, too.

And for the international broadcast media trying to cover events, how to do it without the trusty Blackberry that keeps feeding you with information you need to do the job. Luckily for the broadcast networks and television agencies ability to provide direct satellite coverage were not blocked – it is generally agreed today that one of the smartest media moves the Chinese made at the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests was to cut off live satellite coverage before the army moved in and bloodily dispersed the crowds.  – If the Egyptian authorities had wanted to cut off all of live coverage from Tahrir Square they could have easily done so, too.

Which all goes to show how really vulnerable we all can be at times of strife to government actions that can be taken on very short notice. It wasn’t a 100% comms blackout -- some mobile phone and Internet access was available if you knew where to find them -- but by and large the population was cutoff, and much more effectively than many might have believed possible.

Those in the know say the Egyptian cutoffs were the most comprehensive electronic blackout ever, but it was not, by any means, the first time a government has so controlled Internet access. China did it in 2009 when it cut off service to rioting Xinjiang Province for 10 months, and Myanmar did it in 2007 for a couple of weeks.

It’s not that Egyptians aren’t used to Internet censorship – in the past the government has blocked specific political and social networking websites for a while, including Twitter, but this was a near complete turn-off and if you look at the usage charts by the various Internet trackers they showed Egyptian flat line zero usage for five days.

In China where the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests are not forgotten the events in Egypt apparently were so worrying that suddenly two of the country's biggest web portals were blocking search words such as "Cairo" and "Egypt". Sensitivities still abound.

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