By Jason Shaw
Can you imagine being there, or living with such violence going on around you? Then can you imagine life with no Google, no Facebook, no Twitter, no MSN, no Skype? Impossible to do? Well, since about 5:20 in the morning on Thursday that’s what the whole of Egypt have had to cope with! In an effort to silence the protesters, the Egyptian government took the unprecedented move of shutting down pretty much all of the internet and mobile phone networks, basically turning off the country. Seriously, Egypt has basically been turned off, at least digitally.
Vodafone, said they were told to turn off communications on Thursday by the government as have all the other mobile telecommunications companies and internet providers. In fact at the time of writing, there was just one ISP still running in the country, which carried the Egyptian stock exchange and a few lucky individuals with web access.
It seems scarily easy for the Egyptian Government to just suddenly switch off the net, just like that, poof and it’s gone and the country largely left incommunicado. But could it happen here? Or in the US? Could be suddenly be ‘switched off’
The US say not, at least not just like that, it would take an awful lot of phone calls from the White House before American could be wiped off the digital radar. Mainly because the powers that be don’t have quite as much as much say in internet control and there are thousands more ISP’s than little old Egypt has. Only last year, Joe Lieberman a US senator tried to introduced a bill that would basically introduce a final "kill switch" for all of internet services in North America.
The claim was such a net turn off switch would prove vital in cases of cyber attack and national emergency. But, critics would counter that it could easily be used to stop criticisms of the government of the day, political censorship of mammoth proportions.
Such a sudden switch off of the internet would have massive implications for a countries stability, just Imagine how much business is done online in a single hour let alone a day, a weekend, or even a whole week. The amount of trade that could and would be lost would be so vast its unfathomable, a devastating scenario.
“We have a number of internet suppliers and carriers here in the UK, so it would be a little more difficult to achieve such a rapid switch off as has happened in Egypt” comments internet trends researcher Ed Morrison. “In Egypt the government held control of Telecom Egypt, the main ISP in the country, so it’s far easier to wield the axe and slice off connection. In the UK there are numerous ISP’s, none of which is owned by the government, so getting them to suddenly turn off would take a change in the law” He said, then added “Its completely possible of course, everything is monitored, emails, IM’s, eTransactions, by faceless operators in GCHQ and elsewhere, so censoring and blocking certain sites, is not an action beyond the realms of possibility” In other words more likely though would be censorship of certain sites, which if UK based, could happen rapidly” .
© 2011 Copyright Jason Shaw Tweet
© 2011 Copyright Jason Shaw
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