On 27 January 2010, the Egyptian government appears to have issued the order to sever all international connections to the internet. James Cowie, writing for the Renesys blog, reports “... every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air.” A tiny internet service provider, the Noor Group, remains an exception to the block and Cowie, Renesys’ chief technology officer, speculates it might be to accommodate the Egyptian Stock Exchange next week.
Technically, all routes to Egyptian networks in the internet’s global routing table were withdrawn. Some 3,500 individual border gateway protocol (BGP) routes were simultaneously withdrawn.
To be clear, these route withdrawals weren’t precisely simultaneous. There wasn’t a “kill switch”—that was flipped. A series of telephone calls were made to the providers who spinelessly complied. The Egyptian internet takedown took less than a half hour, but wasn’t instantaneous.
Matt Richtel, writing for the New York Times, reports that cellphone networks also went dark, citing a Vodafone statement on its website: “All mobile operators in Egypt have been instructed to suspend services in selected areas.”
US journalists are mistakenly reporting that the Egyptian communications blackout is unprecedented. It’s not. As Dan Gillmor, writing for Salon, points out, “Burma largely succeeded in closing off its media borders several years ago, and regimes around the planet have created harsh censorship systems that prevent the majority of their people from seeing information deemed unacceptable by the people in charge.”
The scale of the Egyptian blackout, however, is unprecedented.
What happens when you disconnect 80 million people? We’re about to find out, but it’s probably going to take a while.
Cowie notes that the Egyptian action is completely different than what happened during the Tunisian uprising “where specific routes were blocked, or Iran [during its 2009 elections], where the internet stayed up in a rate-limited form designed to make internet connectivity painfully slow.”
If you think it can’t happen in the US, think again. US Senators Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joseph Lieberman (I-Connecticut), who chairs the US Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, proposed legislation last summer that would give the president an internet “kill switch” enabling him or her to shut down privately owned computer systems and networks in the event of a “national cyberemergency” without court review. Lieberman’s committee approved the legislation with modifications on 15 December 2010, but the full Senate did not take up the bill.
Collins told David Kravets, writing for Wired, that the legislation would be reintroduced. “My legislation would provide a mechanism for the government to work with the private sector in the event of a true cyber emergency,” Collins wrote in an email to Kravets on 28 January. “It would give our nation the best tools available to swiftly respond to a significant threat.”
The Collins-Lieberman measure wasn’t the first proposal for an internet “kill switch,” as Declan McCullagh, writing for CNET, reports. McCullagh finds similar proposals from both Democrats and Republicans dating to August 2009 and cites Lieberman and Collins as saying the “president already has ‘nearly unchecked authority’ to control internet companies. A 1934 law [The Communications Act (.pdf; 937KB)] creating the Federal Communications Commission says that in wartime, or if a ‘state of public peril or disaster or other national emergency’ exists, the president may ‘authorize the use or control of any ... station or device.’”
McCullagh goes on to note that apparently Philip Reitinger, Department of Homeland Security deputy undersecretary, agrees. In his congressional testimony last year, Reitinger cited the Communications Act of 1934 as adequately addressing “presidential emergency authorities, and Congress and the administration should work together to identify any needed adjustments to the act, as opposed to developing overlapping legislation.”
The Obama administration has already acted as the enforcement arm of the US entertainment cartel, seizing websites based on allegations—but not proof—of illegal activity.
US Senator Patrick Leahy‘s (D-Vermont) Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act would authorize the US attorney general to order internet service providers to block access to certain foreign websites.
And then there’s the orchestrated political-corporate campaign against WikiLeaks in the US.
As the network neutrality debate continues to rage in the US, the argument has so far focused almost exclusively on the telephone-cable duopoly being able to restrict what information gets delivered (and at what speed) across their networks. As Gillmor points out, “Not enough attention has been given to another element of the duopoly control: The ease with which government, given the legal tools (not that recent governments have cared much for legalities), could order a shutdown.”
Lori Kozlowski, writing for the Los Angeles Times, asks the important question of whether or not internet access is a human right. David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, offers the beginning of an answer when he tells the Times’ Richtel, “internet access was ‘a fundamental right, and it’s very sad if it’s denied to citizens of Egypt or any country.’”
Cowie sums up the situation when he writes, “I predict that Egypt’s ‘kill switch’ experiment will serve as a cautionary tale: The economic and reputational costs of the shutdown far exceed the benefits of regaining total information control.”
Related links:
- Nick Baumann’s “What’s Happening in Egypt Explained” for Mother Jones is the single best overview of the Egyptian socio-political upheaval
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