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.

Comments

I'm Confused

[MightyMartian]

I'm a little confused. How does Tor work when they shut down the Internet?

Re:I'm Confused

[lazy_nihilist]

Simple. The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.

Re:I'm Confused

[Anonymous Coward]

Here

Your donation will go to providing satellite internet devices, other related equipment, to help with network access costs,and general support for Egyptians and people working with Egypt during this crisis and beyond.

Not very hard to find an answer.
Instead of an invoice for my 3 minutes of searching, may I kindly ask you to go to the posted link, fill in the form and hit the "Donate" button.
Thank you.

Net kill switch

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Net kill switch

[ScentCone]

I can't see how this would help in the US

You're misunderstanding what the "kill switch" legislation is. It's not technical. It's a legal mechanism by which the administration can tell services (including operations like Twitter or Google, or just Google's Gmail service, or an entire ISP, or just one blog site), software vendors, or individual engineers that they must take a specific action as required during an emergency. It's no different that the government's already existing ability to commandeer ham radio equipment, or cruise ships, or food distribution companies. If they think that a dozen people are waiting for instructions via Twitter to time their dropping off of backpack bombs on subway trains all around the country, then the "kill switch" is invoked: federal power to tell Twitter to shut down or otherwise do what they say has to be done. The legislation lays out penalties for failure to comply with such orders.

This doesn't give the president a button to push. It gives him lawyers to push, in real time, on short notice.