 protest a fifth term for President Hosni Mubarak in 2005.)
OFFLINE: Members of Egypt's Kefaya movement (also called the Egyptian Movement for Change) protest a fifth term for President Hosni Mubarak in 2005.
Image: COURTESY OF WIKIPEDIA
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The Best Science Writing Online 2012
Showcasing more than fifty of the most provocative, original, and significant online essays from 2011, The Best Science Writing Online 2012 will change the way...
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Egyptians earlier this week took to the Web—Facebook and Twitter, in particular—as a means of organizing their protests against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's three-decade-old government. As of Friday morning, however, there no longer was much of a Web to take to—at least not in Egypt. In an unprecedented turn of events, at 12:34 A.M. local time in Cairo five of the country's major Internet service providers (ISPs) shut down their connections to the Internet.
Speculation is rampant as to what happened, but the most credible reports point to a government-ordered shutdown of nearly all Internet access within Egypt with about 93 percent of Egyptian networks out of service. One of the only connections to the Internet that has not been blocked belongs Noor Data Network, the ISP used by the Egyptian (stock) Exchange.
The shutdown does not appear to be a spontaneous event, given that the Telecom Egypt, Raya, Link Egypt, Etisalat Misr and Internet Egypt ISPs each shut down its part of Egypt's Internet in sequence an average of about three minutes apart, according to Manchester, N.H.-based network security firm Renesys Corp. This sequencing indicates that each of the ISPs may have received a phone call telling them to drop Internet access to their subscribers, as opposed to an automated system that kicked in to take down all of the providers at once, Jim Cowie, Renesys chief technology officer and co-founder, blogged on Friday.
If this analysis is correct, it indicates a level of governmental Internet control unseen to this point, not even in China, Iran and Tunisia, which have been accused of manipulating Internet access to quell government opposition. Scientific American spoke with Cowie, whose company monitors global Internet infrastructure, to better understand how it works under both normal and, in this instance, abnormal conditions.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
What exactly happened in Egypt, and how did it come to your attention?
This is certainly one of the strangest abnormal conditions that we've witnessed in a long time. We study what is known as the global routing table, essentially all of the address prefixes that make up the Internet. ISPs keep this information in their routers. When they need to send traffic to a place, they look up the address to figure out where to send it. We gather those tables from hundreds of providers, and we watch them in real time to figure out what's going on. On January 27, we observed hundreds of providers all over the world suddenly telling us that most of the network addresses in Egypt no longer existed. It's not that their paths were changing a little bit to get better value out of their connection or engineering around a little cable break or something. It was really a matter of just disappearing. And it was just Egypt—you didn't see networks in the Gulf, India or China go down, as you might if a submerged cable in that region had been damaged.
Does this shutdown of Internet access into and out of Egypt resemble attempts by countries such as China, Iran or Tunisia to control the flow of online traffic?
No, it's a completely different class of problem. Typically what happens in countries like Tunisia or Iran or China is people exert very surgical control over information, they will block particular domain names, or they'll block particular Web sites or particular small networks that host content that they don't like. When Iran had its problems after its elections, they slowed down their Internet so they could use it more effectively to control protestors but they didn't take it down. Normally, when someone has a problem on the Internet, it's a single provider, a single organization, that gets in trouble or loses a piece of equipment or runs out of power for their generator after a blackout or something. In this case, within the space of about 20 minutes, all of the largest service providers in Egypt mysteriously and with no apparent coordination all left the Internet. It's a completely different signature.
How could something like Egypt's current situation have happened?
Clearly there was some behind-the-scenes coordination. The most plausible scenario that I could think of is that somebody from the government calls up all their license-holders—all of these regulated ISPs, telecommunications companies, mobile service providers—and just has a conversation with them that says, "Turn it off." The managers of those companies go to their engineers, point to their Internet routers and relay the message, "Turn it off." The engineers log into those routers, make one or two lines of configuration change and hit "return" on the keyboard. Thirty seconds later, it's done.
See what we're tweeting about
16 Comments
Add CommentI suggest that an investigation start at the likely single point of control or failure: how many telecommunications companies are there in Egypt - one?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's quite possible that all Egyptian ISPs simply rent terrestrial bandwidth from a single government controlled telecommunications company. Someone might have to walk around to several devices to interrupt all ISP accesses, but control might have been more easily exercised than is imagined.
Satellite links may be another matter...
Does anyone remember the purpose of the VOA?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat if that agency is repurposed or perhaps another new agency that could provide, at least, spot access to the internet in a wireless/satellite capacity in these circumstances.
The internet has become a tool for freedom and we must support it in countries like Egypt with a similar drive that we used in the VOA program.
Further details would help to piece together the exact way the cut-off was implemented.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDid International IP transit providers providing service in Egypt like Verizon see the BGP session, the IP protocol or link layer go down on their router Interfaces facing Egyptian ISPs?
Are ISPs within Egypt still able to see routes from each other?
The author speculates that the internet infrastructure is too large in the US to be controlled by the government. However, in the case of Julian Assange someone in the government was able to apply enough pressure to force several ISP's to refuse to provide service, as well as fore several large corporations to refuse to provide credit/debit service to Assange. The federal government took these actions behind the scenes, without any legal proceedings. It seems we are closer to government control of our internet service that the author indicates.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen I see an electronic network called an "ecosystem," I think alt.cliche.puke.puke.puke
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThink of it instead as a bunch of boxes with wires going in and out carrying an electronic signal. Flick a switch on the boxes, no more signal in or out. Apparently, the problem in Egypt is a. (known)effective dictatorship, b. (apparently)few enough boxes so that an order to flick the switches can be carried out quickly.
Any country could do that. You know how you can get your internet shut off for non-payment? An ISP could easily shut off everyone at the flick of switch; AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Quest, etc. could all decide to suddenly stop serving US customers, and the internet would effectively be shut down in the US. This isn't a "new level of control", it's the oldest, and by far the easiest to implement.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is much harder to filter content using a firewall than it is to pull the Ethernet plug. If you're wondering how that works, try both.
So much for the people using cloud computing. No thank you.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is just more proof that the only safe internet is as widely decentralized an internet as possible. There ought to be millions of possible connections entering and leaving every country.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe internet here is in big trouble with the consolidation of ISPs down to just a hand full. I would mostly blame the 1996 telecommunications act, which cut off telecoms requirement to allow competitors to collocate equipment at their central offices and only pay the same prices that the telecoms charged their own internal business units.
We can do something about this, by breaking up the large phone and cable companies, and also not allowing any company in the business of laying the cables or building any kind of infrastructure to be in any other business, such as running any equipment that goes on the network, or any service of any kind. That should be freely left to any competitors who would like to upgrade and/or offer services of their own, using the general infrastructure.
We need to develop the next generation of internet, which would more resemble a mesh, or a fishnet of connections, where any given node on the network including that of an end user is connected to multiple nodes at any given moment.
Redundancy and decentralization are our friends, and the enemies of tyrants and monopolies the world round.
That learn us to don't throw away our old analog dialup-modem's. With a dialup-modem we could always connect to Internet through other countries. That is what the egypts are doing now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor us others this is a tip to get backup connections to Internet through dialup access to our nearest neighbour countries.
To learn more please read the latest info about dialup connections and modem pools around the world: http://werebuild.eu/wiki/Egypt/Main_Page
another alternative is to move towards a mesh network...where each node can receive and transmit to and from many...not high bandwidth but very fault(regime) tolerant;-)...I think the one laptop per child computer had this ability built in....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIsn't it strange. Any time people start using the Democracy and Freedom governments often say they lust after for purposes the governments don't like, Democracy and Freedom become tools for evil malcontents (this goes for the US too, think the Lasagne/Wikileaks saga.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"We had to destroy Democracy and Freedom to save them."
And as regards Egypt, isn't is strange that the governments of the US and the EU have suddenly discovered how wonderful Democracy and Freedom might be for Egyptians, after 30 years of robust support for the Mubarak regime during which they were busy stuffing his pockets with money and arming him to the gills.
Great article, by the way, answering a question a lot of us are asking ourselves right now.
Right enternewid! I'm sure those contemplating the cloud got a wake-up call, although, I can't figure out why clouds dire consequences were not immediately apparent at the onset of that idea. Sounds similar to what b2b tried to do in early 2000s and failed.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt looks like just over 5 million people in Egypt have lost access to their facebook accounts with the recent shutdown.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.datagenetics.com/blog/february12011/index.html
Up until this event, facebook registrations were growing rapidly in Egypt (doubling in the last year alone).
Here in Australia we have an even greater potential problem. We have a control freak called Senator Stephen Conroy who wants to implement tools to filter the Internet (ostensibly to control pornography) together with the implementation of the whole of country National Broadband Network under the control of a private company owned by the government.part of this proposal is forced disposal of the existing telecommunications network infrastructure to the government-controlled company. However being owned by the government does not make it subject to Freedom of information legislation so all its internal activities are secret. Consequently one government minister could presumably not only seek to control politically undesirable Internet content, but could if it wanted to turn the whole thing off. That is why many Australians are fearful of both proposals.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat has happened in Egypt's is an indication of what a corrupt government (does anyone know a government which is not corrupt) could do in the future in this country.
Twitter has allowed continued interaction between participants.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGuess where theres a will, there's a way...
Hopefully the spirit of democracy will not be thwarted in a similar way in our country in times of dissent.
It happened before. The whole internet was cut off in Xinjiang in west China (size of 1/6 USA with 21 million people) for 10 months after riots on 15 July 2009. Mobiles text message was cut too. Stock Exchange was also exempted.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere was a story of a couple who make a living by selling local food online has to drive 1000+ km to go to a internet cafe in the next province.
http://blog.jianghu.taobao.com/u/NDc2MTQ1OTM=/blog/blog_detail.htm?aid=25084780 (in Chinese, pls use google translation)