Egypt Flips Internet Kill Switch. Will The U.S.?

The U.S. Must Learn From Egypt's State-Sponsored Denial Of Service Attack On Its Own Citizens.

January 28, 2011 04.30pm EST
Courtesy Of "PC Magazine"

What can an undemocratic government to do to control its people? If tear gas and rubber bullets don't work, take away their Twitter and Facebook access, of course. And if the people still don't fall into line, cut off their Internet and mobile phone access entirely. That's exactly what the Egyptian government did today when confronted with citizenry taking to the streets and demanding regime change. The surprising thing isn't that a corrupt, authoritarian regime would launch this kind of state-sponsored denial off service attack on its own citizens. Nor that it is willing to jeopardize its economy by cutting its businesses off from world markets. No, the thing that surprises me is that the U.S. government has plans for its own Internet Kill Switch.

The legislation was first introduced last summer by Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), and the former has promised to bring it to the floor again in 2011. It isn't called anything as obvious as the Internet Kill Switch, of course. It is called the "Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act." Who could be against that? Anyone who's watching the news on TV today, that's who.

The proposal calls for the Department of Homeland Security to establish and maintain a list of systems or assets that constitute critical cyber-infrastructure. The President would be able to be able to control those systems. He or she would have ability to turn them off. The kicker: none of this would be subject to judicial review. This is just a proposal, mind you, but it certainly warrants concern. Particularly given the heavy-handed example being provided by Egypt.

Reports of Egypt's grand disconnection came first from James Cowie of Renesys, a New Hampshire-based firm that tracks Internet Traffic. As he watched Egypt drop off the grid, Cowie wrote:

"Every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world."

Keeping citizens off the Internet is becoming standard operating procedure during civil unrest. The Iranian government slowed Internet access to a crawl during last year's civil unrest, but the country online. Myanmar has a little more success blocking its citizens. Egypt's move, however, is unprecedented in its scope.

Only about 25% of the Egyptian population has Internet access, but that still works out to 20.1 million users. There are about 55.3 million cell phones, and most of them are dark too, right? Not quite. At this moment the streets are still filled with protesters carrying those disconnected phones—and cameras, and camcorders. With or without Internet access, those protesters are recording both the protests and the government's response. Shutting down Internet access may slow the rate at which those images get out, but it will happen eventually. And by eventually, I mean hours, not days.

Even if the government manages to keep their incipient rebellion off Twitter and Facebook, everything they're doing is bound to leak out sooner or later anyhow. And the denial of service doesn't seem to be hurting the protestors' ability to organize. Once something becomes a trending topic, cutting off Twitter is like closing a barn door after the horses have fled. Egypt's heavy handed actions show how little the country's government understands the Internet. If anything, all they're accomplishing is enraging the protesters even more by proving just how thuggish they can be.

The United States would do well to learn the lesson that Egypt has not. Because, really, the case is all the more complicated here. There are only four major service providers in Egypt: Telecom Egypt, Raya, Link Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and Internet Egypt. Last night, all four took their networks—and the IP addresses of every man, woman, and business in Egypt—offline. This presumably happened at the government's request, though it's worth noting that they haven't admitted anything. (Their email is probably down.)

The U.S. telecommunication industry is much more complex and far more decentralized. To do something similar in the U.S. would require a lot more than four phone calls. There are simply too many connections inside the nation already for them to be silenced. Also, since our economy is more dependent on the Internet obstructing the free flow of information would be disastrous. Still, the push for a U.S. Internet Kill Switch is here, but no one understands the consequences.

The fact is, no one in the U.S. should ever have the right or the ability to take the Internet offline. As an editor of a purely online publication (we made the switch from print a few years ago), it's very clear to me that freedom of the press relies more than ever on the Internet. No one in the U.S.—or anywhere—should have the right to shut it down.

As Cowie put it in his post:

"What happens when you disconnect a modern economy and 80,000,000 people from the Internet? What will happen tomorrow, on the streets and in the credit markets? This has never happened before, and the unknowns are piling up."

Egypt is going to find out what happens the hard way. Let's hope the U.S. never has to.