[governance] http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/latest-updates-on-day-7-of-protests-in-egypt/?hp

Mon Jan 31 15:11:04 EST 2011

Interesting Article:

Source:
http://www.telecomtv.com/comspace_newsDetail.aspx?n=47211&id=e9381817-0593-417a-8639-c4c53e2a2a10&utm_campaign=DailyNews310110asegyptbeginsto&utm_medium=email&utm_source=TTV-Daily-News-Alert

 As Egypt begins to reinstate mobile services, Mubarak wants his mummy
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Mobile comms services in Egypt are slowly returning to some sort of
normality this morning after being shut down on Friday either on the orders
of, or because of direct technical intervention by, the beleaguered Mubarak
administration. Whether this is because the regime is on the point of
collapse or is now more confident in its ability to survive is not yet clear
and remains to be seen. Martyn Warwick reports.

The situation in Egypt is being monitored closely by Renesys, an internet
security firm headquartered in Manchester, New Hampshire, in the US. The
company's co-founder and CTO, Jim Cowie, says Egypt has been able to cut-off
most of the links to the outside world because the Mubarak regime has
ensured over the years that almost all comms networks are routed via
government servers or systems. It also exercises huge control over Egypt's
Internet Service Providers and is thus able, whenever it feels the need, to
kill Internet access, take down wireless and wireline networks and isolate
the bulk of the population from the rest of the virtual world.

Jim Cowie says that at about 17h00 East Coast US time on Thursday last,
(midnight in Egypt) nearly all of the routes to Egypt were simultaneously
closed. He said, "Approximately 3,500 individual BGP (Border Gateway
Protocol) routes were withdrawn leaving no valid paths by which the rest of
the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt's service
providers."

Mr. Cowie adds that such actions are "completely unprecedented" and that
"the Egyptian government's actions essentially wiped their country from the
global map. This is a completely different situation from the modest
internet manipulation that took place in Tunisia, where specific routes were
blocked, or Iran, where the internet stayed up in a rate-limited form
designed to make Internet connectivity painfully slow.”

Interestingly, but unsurprisingly, the 83 live routes run and managed by the
Noor Group, which holds the IP addresses for the Egyptian Stock Exchange,
stayed up and running even s everything else was turned-off.

Meanwhile, BGPmon, a company and website devoted to the monitoring of BGP
communications and analysing, on behalf of clients, what it calls
"interesting" path changes says that on January 21 there were 2,903 Egyptian
networks originated from 52 ISPs. By last Friday (Jan 28) that had fallen to
327 (primarily government) networks and just 26 ISPs. Over the course of a
week some 88 per cent of Egyptian networks were rendered unreachable.

The wholesale closing-down of BGP routes in this way means the Egyptian
state must have access to and control over all international internet
connections in the country as well as the actual physical locations where
the connections are made to the country's national network.

In a statement, BGPmon wrote,“The BGP is built into routers, so to shut off
those connections the state would have to either shut off the router
entirely or shut down the BGP server. This is something that they would have
to do on a router-by-router basis.”

And of course, even those ISP and connections not closed off are being
monitored by shadowy government agencies who are ready to shut them down the
instant they are deemed to have transgressed the unwritten and unfathomable
parameters of a paranoid government's erratic censorship system.

In essence, the simpler a country's comms topology is, and the fewer ISPs a
country has, the easier it is for a regime (or a national operator) to
control a nation's telecoms infrastructure.
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That's why, in September 2007, the military junta in Burma was so easily
able to sever all access to the outside world as its citizen's protested
against a hated government.

Egypt's meshed networks are rather more advanced that those of Burma, but,
in the face of ongoing events in Cairo, Alexandria, Luxor and Suez, Mubarak
and his henchmen have demonstrated that they still have their hands on the
levers of communications power.

However, the uprising has serious implications for the owners of Egypt's
mobile networks. Even as mobile connectivity is being partially restored,
people are beginning to question the seemingly compliant and complicit
relationship between the political regime and the mobile companies. Many
believe they were far too quick to give in to government demands that they
turn-off services.

Vodafone, Mobinil and Etisalat Misr were told to block their networks in
several geographical areas and quickly did so. In a statement Vodafone Egypt
says the authorities have the technical ability to shut down its network,
and, had that happened, it would have taken the company "much longer to
restore services to customers" than if Vodafone hadn't caved-in with little
demur to peremptory government demands.

As for the ramifications this may have for the future, Angel Dobardziev, an
Ovum analyst says, “Press reports that internet connectivity has been shut
down in Egypt, and that mobile operators have been ordered to shut down
services have several broad implications for the wider telecoms industry,
and the Middle East in particular. At a most basic level it underlines the
political risk of operating in the emerging markets for players as diverse
as Vodafone, Blackberry, and Google, which has to be weighted against the
undoubted growth opportunity."

He continues, “More importantly, it is clear that the growth of mobile and
internet services, while bringing massive productivity and social benefits
to the region, has also brought a whole new level of social connectness,
openness, information access, and aspiration. Particularly in the younger
generation that goes against the more conservative and authoritarian
tradition that has been the norm hitherto. In this context, the telecoms
boom in the region accelerated the clash between tradition and modernity,
the open versus closed society, which we are now witnessing in the Middle
East, and other places and which regimes are trying to contain."

Dobardziev concludes, "The genie is out of the bottle, and while some
regimes may try, there is no way of reversing the impact communications have
made on the emerging markets and their people. But as events in Egypt show,
the road ahead may be rocky for all, including telcos and the people they
serve.”

Meanwhile rich Egyptians have been leaving the country as quickly and as
quietly as they can. Over the weekend at least 19 private/corporate jets
flew off with people and their bags of money. It seems most were headed for
Dubai.

Last week Bloomberg interviewed Naguib Sawiris, the billionaire executive
chairman of the mobile operator Orascom. Asked if he planned to flee the
unrest, he said, "I am an Egyptian from top to bottom. I would never leave
this country whatever happens. Unless there is a fundamentalist terrorist
regime, I would never leave."

That's as maybe, but it is reported that his family fled the country by
private jet over the weekend, heading for an undisclosed destination. It is
not known if Mr. Sawiris is still in Egypt.

And, as the unrest continues, the ratings agency Moody's has cut its debt
rating for Egypt, downgrading it from Ba1 to Ba2.

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 5:14 AM, Lee W McKnight <lmcknigh at syr.edu> wrote:

> Note that even with telecoms and net shutdown quite a bit of info is
> getting out of Egypt, albeit with time delay in some cases.
>
> This NYT blog is pretty good:
>
>
> http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/latest-updates-on-day-7-of-protests-in-egypt/?hp
>
> My 'information policy' classes today and tomorrow will simulate - Thursday
> in Egypt; I'll let you know what the MS students conclude.
>
> Lee____________________________________________________________
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