Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 28, 2011 20:15 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333)
In reply to: Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog) by nof
Parent article: Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

When the government orders the backbone providers to literally pull the power from their datacenters to shutdown the internet there is not much you can do.

Unless you feel like raiding the centers and forcing the power back on.

Even wireless can blocked. When it comes to the internet your still dependent on the physical world and the people with the guns set the rules.

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 28, 2011 22:55 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (2 responses)

Generally speaking... a solution that requires political protesters to forcibly take control over any government or privately owned infrastructure in order to get a working network back up and running after a government switch off is a bad solution as that sort of activity can be manipulated by governments as a pretext for an increased level of violent response against the activists.

-jef

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 28, 2011 23:23 UTC (Fri) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Quite possibly. I certainly was not advocating it. I was just stating the obvious. That is what it would take to keep internet running in the case of a government level order to shut it down.

Of course governments have had no problem just making pretexts out of thin air in order to squash political dissent. The majority of governments carry out acts of violence against their own citizens as just a matter of course and then dream up justifications well after the fact.

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 31, 2011 13:36 UTC (Mon) by morganr (guest, #43385) [Link]

Well, Mubarak wants to rule the country and has ordered the police and army to disperse his opponents (using deadly force). Meanwhile they are attempting to call as many of the population onto the streets as possible and hold a general strike in an attempt to force him out.
State control over means of communication (state tv, ISP infrastructure) will prevent these calls from reaching the population quickly and helps stop the movement.

You are proposing to side-step the question of taking over tv stations/ISPs/telephone exchanges by building a second communications network alongside the existing one. This won't work for two reasons 1) people who are revolting because £50 a month wage minus £30 rent can't buy food will not have the necessary equipment, 2) The Egyptian government can use some of the $1.3bn military aid from the US to buy 2.4GHz radio detector vans to drive around and arrest regime opponents with their own network.

Classically in Barcelona and St. Petersburg the revolutionaries were able to take control of the telephone/telegraph exchange and prevent the state from organising itself effectively. The same logic applies today, just that the IP infrastructure that is also important in organising a revolution or its counter-revolution.