Slashdot Mirror
Egyptians Turn To Tor To Organize Dissent Online
An anonymous reader writes "Even as President Obama prepares to follow Mubarak with his own 'internet kill switch', Egyptians were turning to the Tor anonymiser to organise their protests online. The number of Egyptians connecting to the internet over Tor rose more than five-fold after protests broke out last week before crashing when the Government severed links to the global internet. Information security researcher, Tor coder and writer of the bridge that allowed Egypt's citizens to short-circuit government filters, Jacob Appelbaum, told SC Magazine Egyptians were 'concerned and some understand the risk of network traffic analysis.' Appelbaum has himself been the subject of attention from US security services who routinely snatch his electronics and search his belongings when he re-enters the country and who subpoenaed his private Twitter account last December." Which helps explain why Appelbaum is helping to organize a small fundraiser to get more communications gear into Egypt.
I see people always going on about that. I can't see how this would help in the US. If people were protesting or there was unrest in the US, hitting the net kill switch would be economic suicide. In Egypt and Tunisia, the net was used more for socializing than business. In the US, the bulk of net use (in pure data) is business related. Our entire economy runs off of the net now. Turning it off would shut down or severely hobble a large number of fortune 500 companies, not to mention thousands of small and medium sized businesses. Also, like in Egypt and Tunisia, it would just give people more reason to go out on the streets. Without the net to bitch about the state of the country/world on, they would turn to going outside and raising hell instead. So sure, the govt can build their kill switch, but only if they plan to jettison our economy with the push oa button.
How far does the information have to travel, to get to the nearest border? About 250 miles. Less, if there's a point to point wireless relay. Sure, the "Internet" may be disabled. So all the fiber coming in country may be disabled. So all the ISP's may have downed their uplink interfaces. That doesn't mean an uplink isn't a tower climb away.
Then again, I wouldn't want to be the guy climbing a tower to set up an uplink directly against the government's will, in the middle of a freakin' revolution. It's either a way to find out what the real effective of a MPK (or M16, or M4, or M40A3, or M21, or M1A2, or T55E, or... or .... or... damn, they have a huge variety of weapons). Shot off a tower, or a tower shot out from under you. Neither sounds like a very good option. Twitter wouldn't seem to be the highest priority during combat.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
For a European like me, the difference between Democratic and Republican presidents seems minimal with regards to electronic surveillance and censorship.
In my own country, Sweden, the parties conveniently switch to criticising surveillance and censorship when they're out of power, only to conveniently switch back when they're in power again.