Internet technology is a tool for political change in Arab world

 

The revolts in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen are driven by deep dissatisfaction with authoritarian regimes, but Internet technology has played a crucial role as a 21st-century weapon for democracy movements, experts say.

Inspired by the recent overthrow of the Zine El Abidine Ben Ali dictatorship in Tunisia, citizen activists on Thursday escalated their protests in Egypt and Yemen, denouncing their respective governments. And social media played the dual role of a virtual town square where protest leaders rally the masses and counter government disinformation.
Services such as Twitter and Facebook are "playing an increasingly large role in almost any mass protest around the world," said John Palfrey, a law professor at Harvard University who studies limits on Internet expression. "We will see more of this."
 
The demonstrations in Egypt, where the government completely shut down the Internet late Thursday, "were started primarily by the April 6 Movement, which was basically a Facebook campaign that started in 2008 and called for protests about workers' rights," said Lina Khatib, a Stanford University expert on Arab reform who was in Cairo on Thursday before leaving for Paris.
During the latest unrest, Twitter became an instant information tool, she said: "People were spreading the news on Twitter. They would alert people where demonstrators were gathering."
But it is long-simmering anger against authoritarian governments that is sending
 unarmed protesters against police and soldiers."What has already happened in Tunis and may be happening right now in Cairo and Tripoli is a revolution that uses social media, but is not a revolution caused by social media," said Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University's Graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program.
Most of the Egyptian protesters have probably never used the Internet. But Internet-savvy elites were the catalyst for the demonstration, Khatib said.
"The reason why it was so effective is because of what happened in Tunisia," she said. "They saw it on TV. They heard about it. It was the first time a civilian uprising had torn down a regime in the Arab world."
Technology's role in organizing opposition has not been lost on the governments of that volatile region.
In Cairo, by late Thursday phone service was cut, Twitter and Facebook were blocked and a media blackout was in place, Khatib said. "The government knew people would be coordinating their movements to join the demonstration," she said.
Egypt is far from alone in seeing the Internet and other new technology as threats. The number of countries censoring or blocking at least some Internet content has increased from two about 10 years ago to three dozen now, Palfrey said.

Iran, for example, blocked access to Facebook for fear it was being used to help facilitate street protests over the disputed presidential election in 2009, and the Palo Alto company said it saw its traffic from Iran drop in half. The Chinese government, beginning with the 2008 Summer Olympics, began applying even more controls to the Internet. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are blocked by the communist government.
Facebook said in a statement Thursday: "We are aware of reports of disruption to service and have seen a drop in traffic from Egypt." San Francisco-based Twitter, which did not comment directly on the blocking of its service, said in a tweet, "We believe that the open exchange of info & views benefits societies & helps govts better connect w/ their people."
The Obama administration has taken a more aggressive stance against Internet censorship than previous administrations, Palfrey said.
On Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged Egypt "not to prevent peaceful protests or block communications, including on social media."
But the uprising in Egypt, a longtime ally of the United States, puts President Barack Obama in a tough situation, and it's unclear how much pressure he will ultimately apply on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Khatib said.

"For the U.S., this is a test: Who do you really care about most?" she said. "The leaders in the Arab world, who are your allies, or the people who are calling for the same values you are supposed to represent?"
Jacob Appelbaum, a San Francisco programmer with the longtime open-source Tor Project, a program that cloaks the identity of users that is popular with corporations and free-speech activists alike, cautioned against "cyberutopia." The very technology used by democracy advocates can also be used to trap them, he said.
"The unblocking of Twitter may not be a good thing," Appelbaum said, unless protesters use a cloaking service. "It seems good on its face. But if the regime does not fall, it could hunt down everyone who uses Twitter."
 

Could the U.S. shut down the internet?

-- It seemed so easy for Egypt. Just order a shutdown of the country's internet connections and -- bam -- it happens.
But is such an authoritarian action transferable? Could the U.S. government shut down American internet connections? And is it possible for the global internet to be toppled?


Technically, yes, internet experts said Wednesday, shortly after Egypt's government restored internet connections there as violent political protests continued. But it's highly unlikely.
"Could you break the internet? Yeah. Can you shut it down? No. Shutting down the entire internet would be pretty much impossible at this point," said Jim Cowie, co-founder of Renesys, an worldwide internet tracker.
Cowie spoke of the internet as if it were a giant, adaptable worm.
"The funny thing about the internet is even if you break it in half, the two halves will function as [separate] internets," he said.
How Egypt shut down the internet
Understanding what happened in Egypt helps frame the discussion about what could happen to the internet in the United States or around the globe.

According to internet traffic monitors and experts, Egypt's government likely called the country's five main internet service providers -- like on the phone -- late last week and ordered them to barricade online traffic.
That's sort of like calling all of the post offices in the country and telling them to throw the mail away instead of delivering it, said Robert Faris, research director at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

But instead of shredding paper mail, the Egyptian internet providers altered their Border Gateway Protocols, the software that routes online information.

"There's not an on-off switch," Faris said. "What it is, it's a list of IP addresses that route information between nodes on the internet. And what they did (in Egypt) is they changed all the software and the list in there to something called null routing. So all the traffic going in and out was essentially thrown away."
Faris called these measures extreme. They have been carried out in only two other instances, he said: In Myanmar during 2007 protests; and in Nepal in 2005, when the king seized power.
Iran and China filter the internet instead of blocking it, he said.
Could the United States do the same?

Technically, the United States could do the same thing Egypt did to block internet access, Faris said.
The government would have to call four or five top internet providers and order them to disrupt Border Gateway Protocols in a way that shut down the majority of American internet traffic, he said. Others said the government would have to deal with the country's thousands of internet providers in order to fully clamp down on internet access, which would be logistically difficult.

But that's unlikely to happen here, experts said.
For one thing, the internet in the U.S. is bigger. There are more companies involved, more data at play and more locations where the internet comes in and out of the country.
Moreover, U.S. law would prevent such an authoritarian shutdown.

"The internet is a network of networks," said Andrew Blum, a correspondent for CNN content partner Wired magazine and author of an upcoming book on internet infrastructure, "and they're all commercially operated.
"They're all businesses. Their autonomy is sort of their bread and butter. And they're mostly unregulated. So the idea of having to comply fully with any government order to shut them off is pretty extreme. It's as if there were a government order to close every McDonald's -- all at once."
A country's legal framework, not its technical infrastructure, determines whether it is able to shut down its citizens' access to the internet, said Cowie.

"It really comes down to the fact that somebody has to have the legal authority to go to a company that runs a large part of the internet in the United States and say, 'Turn off your connection to the outside world.' "
However, as CNET reports, three U.S. senators have submitted legislation to give the president emergency powers over the internet in the event of a cyberattack or other disaster scenario.
On Wednesday, the bill's authors tried to distance themselves from what's happened in Egypt, issuing a statement:
"Our bill already contains protections to prevent the president from denying Americans access to the Internet -- even as it provides ample authority to ensure that those most critical services that rely on the Internet are protected."

What about elsewhere?
Shutting down the global internet would be more of a trick, requiring a level of global coordination that would be extremely unlikely if not impossible, the experts said.
"If you really wanted to turn off the global internet, you'd have to seek out people on every continent and every country," said Cowie from Renesys. "The internet is so decentralized that there is no kill switch."
"No you can't do that," said Harvard's Faris. "The internet is designed to be robust. Certain links break and then other links are opened."

In Egypt, for example, people who couldn't access the broadband internet were able to place international phone calls to Europe to log on to dial-up internet service, he said, which, of course, operates on phone lines.
Google even announced a service that would let people in Egypt use landline telephones to post to Twitter using voice messages.

"Communication continues and people revert to other modes," he said. "You can shut the internet down but it's not the end of organization. People are still there in the square, and they're figuring out how to do it."