| Hat tip to the Puppy Blender. |
| But we'd never have anything like that in the U.S., and we'd never pass a law to let a president shut down our internet, nope, nope. |
"Most of the outage was effected through a breaker flipped in the Ramses exchange, and the rest was phone calls and arm-twisting," the presentation says. 'Ramses exchange' refers to a central building in Cairo where Egyptian ISPs meet to trade traffic and connect outside of the country, a facility known as an Internet Exchange Point.
The report's timeline also contradicts many observers' guesses that a smaller internet provider called Noor escaped the initial shutdown because it provided connectivity to Egypt's stock market and several government agencies. According to the presentation, Noor seems to have been hunted down by the intelligence service, just like many other small Egyptian ISPs.
[Woodcock's] company's monitoring equipment was shut off, as was equipment from other companies; that the intelligence service did call some ISPs; and that the shutdown didn't involve manipulation of BGP, a routing protocol, as many had originally assumed.
Most media, including Wired.com, reported that government officials contacted individual ISPs and told them to shut down their networks, under threat of losing their communications licenses. But the document contradicts that narrative, providing new details on the outage -- largely laying the blame on Egypt's internal security service, while describing the "flip-the-switch" shutdown as a "politically liberal" choice by the Egyptian communications ministry.
That's because turning off the internet at the center exchange made it very easy to switch it back on, prevented surveillance, made it clear to everyone what had happened, and prevented spyware from being placed on the networks.
Compare that to Tunisia, where Facebook login pages were manipulated -- presumably by the government -- to grab the passwords of Tunisian activists in order to delete their accounts and protest pages.
The presentation suggests the weeklong shutdown had severe effects on Egypt's economy, in the short term from loss of commerce, and in the long term from a likely plummet in tourism, and an exodus of call centers from Egypt.
The presentation concludes that the ministry's course of action in obeying the orders may have some positive effects in the future: "Itʼs unlikely that Egyptʼs communications ministry will ever be asked to flip that switch again."
| A timeline is presented, as is a Powerpoint show, at the link. |