No Internet In Egypt As Protests Escalate

By Ronnie Kerr at Vator.tv:

First Facebook and Twitter were made inaccessible, now the entire Web. Blocking access to Twitter and Facebook just wasn’t enough for the Egyptian government. Around 11 hours ago — or a little after midnight in Egypt — the Internet went completely dark.

Source: Vator.tv

Now protesters all across Egypt must find a way to organize without the Web and, in Cairo, with an elite special operations force deployed to put a stop to massive demonstrations that have rippled across the state, ignited by a revolt in Tunisia that successfully toppled the regime there.

Both were drastic measures taken as preemptive steps by the Egyptian government ahead of possibly the largest demonstrations yet, which Reuters says are planned for Friday after weekly prayers.

But neither the people taking to the streets in Tunisia nor those in Iran during the summer of 2009 ever had to face a complete blackout of the Internet, a highly strategic attack on Egyptians’ freedom of speech undoubtedly ordered into effect by the Egyptian government.

“It’s probably a phone call that goes out to half a dozen folks who enter a line on a router configuration file and hit return,” said Craig Labovitz, chief scientist for Arbor Networks the security company responsible for the graph above. “It’s like programming your TiVo — you have things that are set up and you delete one. It’s not high-level programming.”

The decision to bar all online access was also likely spurred on by a nonstop flow of protest footage to sites like YouTube, disseminated through social networks, displaying the deteriorating situation on the ground. Additionally, there are reports that possibly dozens have been killed along with at least 100 injured in Cairo alone…

[continues at Vator.tv]