On January 25th American senators reintroduced a bill granting the president emergency powers to shut down parts of the nation’s internet as a defence against cyber-attack. Three days later Egypt’s embattled autocrats took their country offline. Outrage at the five-day shutdown of Egypt’s once-flourishing internet (used by 20m people there) and its mobile-phone network (used by 55m) has given opponents of the “kill switch” in America and elsewhere some powerful arguments. The people in charge of the internet in places such as Germany, Austria and Australia were among those who felt obliged to confirm that their governments would not seek similar powers.
A remote “kill switch”, even if authorised, would be hugely complex and expensive to build and run, though some worry that the new cybersecurity agencies proposed by lawmakers are just the kind of bodies that would have a go.
Egypt’s blackout had plenty of chinks. Several groups abroad offered internet access through the terrestrial phone system to Egyptians who could afford to dial in with old-fashioned modems, though the service was slow and the calls expensive. Google and Twitter launched a “speak-to-tweet” service, enabling Egyptians to leave voicemails which were then converted into text and published on Twitter’s microblogging service. People dusted off ham radios and fax machines.
Egypt is not the only country to try to suspend the national internet. In 2007 the authorities in Myanmar cut internet connections to counter anti-government demonstrations. Two years earlier a similar move severed services in Nepal. During the unrest in Tunisia in January, the authorities censored some news and social networking sites; Iran and Thailand have done likewise. Following ethnic riots in its Xinjiang province in 2009, China blocked e-mail, text messages and all but a handful of websites in the region as part of disruption that lasted for ten months; it has lately blocked searches for “Egypt” on several popular microblogging sites. But only North Korea denies its entire civilian population any access to the net.
Such regimes are unlikely to take heart from Egypt’s experience. The internet and mobile crackdown did not derail the protests. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, an intergovernmental think-tank in Paris, estimates that the network shutdowns alone may have cost Egypt as much as $90m.
Read more at The Economist
