Category Archives: Abuse of Police Powers

According to Wired:

Most media, including Wired.com, reported that government officials contacted individual ISPs and told them to shut down their networks, under threat of losing their communications licenses.

But the document (embedded below) contradicts that narrative, providing new details on the outage — largely laying the blame on Egypt’s internal security service, while describing the “flip-the-switch” shutdown as a “politically liberal” choice by the Egyptian communications ministry.

That’s because turning off the internet at the center exchange made it very easy to switch it back on, prevented surveillance, made it clear to everyone what had happened, and prevented spyware from being placed on the networks.

Compare that to Tunisia, where Facebook login pages were manipulated — presumably by the government — to grab the passwords of Tunisian activists in order to delete their accounts and protest pages.

The presentation suggests the weeklong shutdown had severe effects on Egypt’s economy, in the short term from loss of commerce, and in the long term from a likely plummet in tourism, and an exodus of call centers from Egypt.

Should we be concerned here? Considering how easy that was?
Yet, if you go read that Wired article and take a look at the timeline of events, it would appear this “shut down” cost Egypt a lot of money.

UPDATE: And now, Algeria does the same, shutting down teir internet and Facebook.

CONNECTED: Mubarak said something to Israel about us.