03 Feb 11 | Middle East and North Africa, News and features
London, 16.30 GMT Index on Censorship condemns the tactics of intimidation and violence being used against peaceful protesters, journalists and human rights activists in Egypt. Over the past 24 hours, there have been reports of both Egyptians and foreigners being injured, detained and intimidated in the beginning of a crackdown. Incidents include: the arrest of three al Jazeera journalists; the disappearance of Swedish reporter Bert Sundström; the harassment of reporters from Daily News Egypt; the beating of Egyptian blogger Sandmonkey; the arrest of Washington Post journalists Leila Fadel and Linda Davidson; the attacks on hotels in Cairo housing foreign journalists; and the detention of foreign and Egyptian human rights workers.
We call on the government and the authorities to release all journalists, human rights workers and protesters who are being unlawfully held and to abide by Egypt’s legal obligations in respecting freedom of expression and the right to protest. We remind President Mubarak that Egypt is a signatory to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. We ask the EU, the United States and the UN to put pressure on the Egypytian government to restrain forces acting in its name.
01 Feb 11 | Egypt, Middle East and North Africa
Last night at around 11pm local time Egypt’s last remaining ISP was taken offline. There are also unconfirmed rumours that mobile network services are to be cut today. The Noor Group ISP served the Egyptian stock exchange and a number of hotels serving an international clientele.
As soon as I have a way to circumvent the system, I’ll be back with an update.
31 Jan 11 | Middle East and North Africa, News and features
As Egypt enters a seventh day of open revolt against the rule of President Hosni Mubarak, the country’s internet access continues to be largely shut down. That extended closure is one of the clearest signs that Mubarak still sees this as a fight he can win.
The longer the internet shutdown continues, the more and more mysterious the government’s thinking becomes. The last week has proven not only that the protesters don’t need Twitter and Facebook access to challenge the system but also that the world’s media don’t necessarily need it to bring details, images and even videos of this mass revolt to the world.
Each day brings new evidence of the complete futility of the gesture. Prominent local bloggers and online activists are simply calling friends overseas to tweet details on their behalf, the flood of journalists entering the country are almost all coming in armed with Thuraya satellite phones and Bgan receivers that enable you to get online from anywhere.
At this point, it’s likely that the main victim of the government’s online blockade will be the Egyptian economy. The country’s banks and stock market were shut down on Monday and the overall economic damage from the government’s decision to cut Egypt off from the world is something that will be hard to measure for a while.
Yesterday I met up with a prominent blogger and digital activist who blogs and tweets under the name of Sandmonkey. He gleefully told me that cracking the internet blockade was becoming an international cause célèbre for the international digital expression community. There were plans afoot, he said, for a group of “hardcore open source guys from Germany” to arrive here with satellite phones and all the equipment they needed to set up a local internet network completely beyond the reach of the authorities.
“They’re going to bypass the whole system,” he told me.
