Why do autocratic rulers who were or are under threat in the Middle East not block internet and mobile phone traffic to limit protest and to keep control over communications? There have been attempts – firstly in Tunisia, where specific internet routes were blocked, then in Egypt where 90% of all international connections to the internet were shut down on the orders of the Mubarak government on January 27th and stayed down until 2nd February, cutting off most of the services that the protestors were using to communicate with each other and to co-ordinate demonstrations.
At the beginning of June, Syria attempted to restrict access to the internet on Fridays, the day when protests reach their height after Friday prayers. On June 3rd much of the internet was shut down for the day (see Figure 1), although government websites were still accessible. A week later there was no shutdown but traffic was throttled, meaning that messages were slow to arrive or sometimes could not be sent at all. Given that traffic was restored on the next day each time, communication with the outside world was delayed by 24 hours at most, so this seems to have been an attempt to restrict the ability of protestors to organise during those Fridays. However, as the tactic has not been repeated, it looks as though the Syrian government did not judge it to have been successful.
But the blockages suffered from two major limitations to their effectiveness. First of all, cutting off international internet access in this age of global interdependence has a huge impact on any country’s trade and reputation. The reason that the blockage in Egypt was not total seems to have been because one internet provider (Noor) was allowed to keep its connections open to provide links for the stock exchange. Most of the economy was severely hit, however, and a long-term blockage would have caused a massive economic depression, especially as international finance on which so much trade depends would no longer have been available and the country’s credit rating would plummet.
In addition to this crippling of the economy, the second reason for the ineffectiveness of the blockage is the ability to find workarounds to bypass the control. Four of the many ingenious examples are – those near borders use foreign mobile phone services; satellite wifi networks are put in place; computers are connected via dial-up phone lines; and “speak to tweet” services are organised. The amount of traffic may be severely reduced but it does not require huge bandwidth for people to communicate key news to those whom they trust who can then pass on the message to their own networks. The danger of messages being intercepted was also increased as the traffic reduced and as simpler communications methods were used, but a number of international programmes, such as the Tor Project, made available free encryption software which was increasingly used by protestors.