Internet Censorship

Egypt Shuts Off Tech, Tries to Shut Up Protesters

January 28, 2011

Fast Company - The Egyptian government, facing mass protests in the nation's streets by citizens calling for regime change, has shut off the Internet, SMS, and BlackBerry service--and may have shuttered some mobile phone systems too. Now the population is turning to 20th century solutions.

Earlier this week we wrote about mass pro-democracy protests on the streets of Egypt's cities, which were organized--at least in part--using social media like Twitter and Facebook, and with the same sites, along with Twitpic and its peers being used to share news and video and photo evidence about real-time events.

The government resisted the protests physically on the streets, but also launched a digital offensive--first shutting off access to Twitter on Wednesday, then Facebook on Thursday. For a while protesters were seemingly able to skirt the blocks by using proxy addresses, but the tweeting may have had an unexpected negative effect: The police were gathering at pre-arranged protest sites ahead of time, to dissuade protesters, suggesting they appeared to be utilizing information gleaned online.

Now Internet access across the whole nation has been shut off, as the Net traffic volume chart from Arbor Networks embedded here shows. As an investigation by Renesys demonstrates, at around 12:34 in the morning local time "virtually simultaneous withdrawal" of all Egypt's networks connected to the world's IP routing system--meaning data access routes into or out of Egypt were shut down. It's a complete order of magnitude more severe censorship that happened in Iran, when the government tinkered with blocking social media sites, and is far worse than the "modest Internet manipulation" that the Tunisian authorities tried as similar protests happened there. Essentially the Egyptian government has realized it cannot stay one digital step ahead of its population, and has simply thrown the off-switch.

Initial investigations showed that some Egyptian ISPs were allowed to maintain tightly limited links to the rest of the world, and Renesys's tests showed that the Egyptian Stock Exchange website was accessible through its ISP Noor Group via some restricted IP addresses. This may not now be the case, as the exchange website seems to be accessible. Some reports from inside Egypt suggest Noor's dial-up DSL service may still be operational, but these have yet to be confirmed--however there is still much activity on Twitter that implies Noor's service may be working in places, and users are being encouraged to remove their Wi-Fi passwords to enable freer access.

There are also scattered reports that SMS service across the nation is being disrupted, and it also appears that mobile phone services, at least in Cairo itself, may also be closed down.

According to at least one tweeter, Al Jazeera's live station, Al Jazeera Mubashar, may also have been blocked inside Egypt--to prevent its coverage of the protests and increasing reports of police brutality from fomenting more protests:

According to CNN's Cairo reporter Benn Wedeman in a tweet, the police brutality is extending to journalists recording the events--with police officers attacking reporters and camera men, breaking their equipment and confiscating it. BBC tweeter Lyse Douchet notes in a tweet that her Arabic colleague Assa Alsawy "arrives office, white shirt red with blood, beaten by police."

These latest moves are almost certainly aimed at controlling the spread of news about the protests to the rest of the world.

Egypt's government would seem to be shutting off the 21st century, declaring a war on tech, just to keep its population under control.

Meanwhile, though the security forces seem to be clamping down on the streets, and the digital battle seems to be won by the government, there's also news that old-fashioned social networking solutions are being used to permit discussions and organize protests:

Other reports suggest that ham radio operators may be trying to help coordinate protests and the spread of news--using an older technology that's far harder for the government to interfere with as it's point-to-point.

And, as the Guardian newspaper points out, Egyptians have also resorted to handing out quickly-printed paper flyers to encourage participation and spread news.

Read more of our coverage on the protests in Egypt.

How Egypt Turned Off the Internet

January 28, 2011

Gizmodo - Yesterday, something unprecedented happened: Egypt turned off the internet. A nation of 80,000,000 instantly disconnected. So how'd they do it?

Phone Calls

There was no giant lever or big red button involved, but in reality it was almost as easy: the Egyptian Government simply issued an order for ISPs to shut down service.

"Under Egyptian legislation the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it," Vodafone Egypt explained in a statement shortly after.

Along with Vodafone, Egypt's other three major ISPs, Link Egypt, Telecom Egypt, and Etisalat Misr, all stopped service. Jim Cowie, the co-founder and CTO of internet monitoring firm Renesys, told the WSJ:

What is most likely is that somebody in the government gives a phone call to a small number of people and says, ‘Turn it off.' And then one engineer at each service provider logs into the equipment and changes the configuration of how traffic should flow.

It was likely as easy as that.

BGPs

Renesys saw the effects immediately. Some 3,500 Border Gateway Protocol or BGP routes—the places where networks connect and announce which IP addresses they are responsible for—disappeared in an instant:

At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet's global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt's service providers. Virtually all of Egypt's Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.

But Stéphane Bortzmeyer, an IP communications whiz, surmised that Egypt pulled the plug on the net literally:

"BGP is the symptom, not the cause. The cables have simply been unplugged."

Withdrawing BGP routes (or just unplugging cables) is a much more effective way of blocking the internet than, say, turning off DNS, in which case users could use DNS from overseas to access the internet. Compared to Tunisia, where certain BGP routes were blocked, or Iran, where internet connections were simply throttled, Egypt's disconnection is a severe one.

Disconnected (Almost)

As of last night, Renesys estimated that 93% of Egyptian's networks were unreachable, with only one service provider, the Noor Group, still serving its customers. It's unclear why they're the only ones who didn't get turned off, though some are speculating that its role as service provider for the Egyptian Stock Exchange is what's keeping it online.

Reports from Egypt suggest that citizens may be able to use dial-up to access the internet, and LifeHacker has the nitty gritty on how to do it. It's not going to be fast, but it seems like for a vast majority of the Egyptians, it might be the only option. [Renesys, DomainIncite]

Egypt's Internet Shut Off--But How? The Blackout Explained

January 28, 2011

The Huffington Post - As anti-government protesters and police clash in Cairo, internet service cut off in Egypt.

But how did the country manage to shut off the Internet?

A few possibilities have been raised: the routers directing traffic across borders can be shut down, digitally sealing the country off from the world, or routers can be shut down at the level of individual internet service providers so that those inside the country are also cut off from the Internet.

According to Gigaom, it's the latter that's occurred:

The signs are that the Egyptian authorities have taken a very careful and well-planned method to screen off internet addresses at every level, from users inside the country trying to get out and from the rest of the world trying to get in.

"It looks like they're taking action at two levels," Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro told me. "First at the DNS level, so any attempt to resolve any address in .eg will fail -- but also, in case you're trying to get directly to an address, they are also using the Border Gateway Protocol, the system through which ISPs advertise their internet protocol addresses to the network. Many ISPs have basically stopped advertising any internet addresses at all."

The Guardian added some insight to the breadth of the shutdown across the country:

The shut down involved the withdrawal of more than 3,500 Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routes by Egyptian ISPs, according to Renesys, a networking firm. Only one ISP out of 10, Noor Data Networks, appeared largely unaffected. It connects to the outside world via an undersea cable operated by Telecom Italia.

According to BGPMon, another networking firm, 88 per cent of Egyptian internet access was successfully shut down, however.

Yet, the Egyptian Stock Exchange is still functioning, writes the Financial Times:

But you'd really have to ask what the hell you're doing investing in this country -- its banks, its telecoms, and its transport infrastructure -- if security forces can block it all off at a moment's notice. You're investing upon Pharaoh's terms. That's why keeping the exchange site open is astonishing -- it just makes the charade transparent.

Renesys, the internet monitoring firm, calls these actions "unprecedented in Internet history."

Visit our live blog for the most recent updates about the ongoing protests in Egypt. See what Egypt's internet blackout looks like here.