Things we take for granted

I don’t necessarily like the classic “Back In My Day” stories… frankly put I still happen to think today is my day too, and well – so is tomorrow! BUT – I have been lucky enough to around during some great and drastic changes in our world – and most of them computer related. In the United States there are many things that we have that are unique and very special, freedom being one of them. Until you have experienced or been awakened to the realities elsewhere in the world of oppression and despotism it may not even hit your personal RADAR screen. The luxuries of food, reliable electricity, or even drinking water are just there – and you probably accept that they always will be. Be thankful for that comfort.

Revolutions can be soft and gradual, or they can be violent and bloody. Protests can be peaceful or they can turn deadly. In an age of distance shattering electronic communications we have seen many different forms and combinations of activism, protest, and calls for change. Some have taken easier softer approaches and been accused of “slackertivisim” simply signing up for online petitions or posting a color on their status line. We heard of great organizing possibilities of Twitter in Iran in 2010, only to find out later the media may have overblown and not understood that the volume and location of the traffic was not even located inside the country. It’s easy to call for a march to the streets when you are 6,000 miles away and don’t have to face the bullets flying on the ground.

It has always been a strategic mission in time of war to take out your enemy’s communications. The strategy hasn’t changed, but the communications have. Below is an article from The Associated Press newswire about an extraordinary event that happened Jan 28th, 2011…. Egypt was cut clear of the Internet. Amid rising political protests and violence in the streets, the Egyptian government co-ordinated a mass outage of all terrestrial Internet access through the four service providers in the country.

Any leading expert will say that this could simply not happen in the United States. There are too many access points. There are too many independent service providers. The “system” is not government controlled and is open to all. This may be true today, but do not take it for granted that it will always be that way. Pay attention to the news. Inform yourselves on issues like Net Neutrality. Understand that in time of war or other national emergency special powers may, could, and WILL be applied.

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Can you imagine your internet access being shut off? How do you organize your friends and know where everyone is going on a Saturday night? How do you know what is going on in the world around you? Who do you communicate with to know this and know it’s real and true? What would you do if everything you took for granted came crashing down around you….

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The Article:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110128/ap_on_hi_te/us_egypt_protest_internet_outage/print

The day part of the Internet died: Egypt goes dark
By JORDAN ROBERTSON, AP Technology Writer Fri Jan 28, 7:29 am ET
SAN FRANCISCO –

About a half-hour past midnight Friday morning in Egypt, the Internet went dead.

Almost simultaneously, the handful of companies that pipe the Internet into and out of Egypt went dark as protesters were gearing up for a fresh round of demonstrations calling for the end of President Hosni Mubarak's nearly 30-year rule, experts said.

Egypt has apparently done what many technologists thought was unthinkable for any country with a major Internet economy: It unplugged itself entirely from the Internet to try and silence dissent.

Experts say it's unlikely that what's happened in Egypt could happen in the United States because the U.S. has numerous Internet providers and ways of connecting to the Internet. Coordinating a simultaneous shutdown would be a massive undertaking.

"It can't happen here," said Jim Cowie, the chief technology officer and a co-founder of Renesys, a network security firm in Manchester, N.H., that studies Internet disruptions. "How many people would you have to call to shut down the U.S. Internet? Hundreds, thousands maybe? We have enough Internet here that we can have our own Internet. If you cut it off, that leads to a philosophical question: Who got cut off from the Internet, us or the rest of the world?"

In fact, there are few countries anywhere with all their central Internet connections in one place or so few places that they can be severed at the same time. But the idea of a single "kill switch" to turn the Internet on and off has seduced some American lawmakers, who have pushed for the power to shutter the Internet in a national emergency.

The Internet blackout in Egypt shows that a country with strong control over its Internet providers apparently can force all of them to pull their plugs at once, something that Cowie called "almost entirely unprecedented in Internet history."

The outage sets the stage for blowback from the international community and investors. It also sets a precedent for other countries grappling with paralyzing political protests — though censoring the Internet and tampering with traffic to quash protests is nothing new.

China has long restricted what its people can see online and received renewed scrutiny for the practice when Internet search leader Google Inc. proclaimed a year ago that it would stop censoring its search results in China.

In 2009, Iran disrupted Internet service to try to curb protests over disputed elections. And two years before that, Burma's Internet was crippled when military leaders apparently took the drastic step of physically disconnecting primary communications links in major cities, a tactic that was foiled by activists armed with cell phones and satellite links.

Computer experts say what sets Egypt's action apart is that the entire country was disconnected in an apparently coordinated effort, and that all manner of devices are affected, from mobile phones to laptops. It seems, though, that satellite phones would not be affected.

"Iran never took down any significant portion of their Internet connection — they knew their economy and the markets are dependent on Internet activity," Cowie said.

When countries are merely blocking certain sites — like Twitter or Facebook — where protesters are coordinating demonstrations, as apparently happened at first in Eqypt, protesters can use "proxy" computers to circumvent the government censors. The proxies "anonymize" traffic and bounce it to computers in other countries that send it along to the restricted sites.

But when there's no Internet at all, proxies can't work and online communication grinds to a halt.
Renesys' network sensors showed that Egypt's four primary Internet providers — Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr — and all went dark at 12:34 a.m. Those companies shuttle all Internet traffic into and out of Egypt, though many people get their service through additional local providers with different names.

Italy-based Seabone said no Internet traffic was going into or out of Egypt after 12:30 a.m. local time.

"There's no way around this with a proxy," Cowie said. "There is literally no route. It's as if the entire country disappeared. You can tell I'm still kind of stunned."

The technical act of turning off the Internet can be fairly straightforward. It likely requires only a simple change to the instructions for the companies' networking equipment.

Craig Labovitz, chief scientist for Arbor Networks, a Chelmsford, Mass., security company, said that in countries such as Egypt — with a centralized government and a relatively small number of fiber-optic cables and other ways for the Internet to get piped in — the companies that own the technologies are typically under strict licenses from the government.

"It's probably a phone call that goes out to half a dozen folks who enter a line on a router configuration file and hit return," Labovitz said. "It's like programming your TiVo — you have things that are set up and you delete one. It's not high-level programming."

Twitter confirmed Tuesday that its service was being blocked in Egypt, and Facebook reported problems.

"Iran went through the same pattern," Labovitz said. "Initially there was some level of filtering, and as things deteriorated, the plug was pulled. It looks like Egypt might be following a similar pattern."

The ease with which Egypt cut itself also means the country can control where the outages are targeted, experts said. So its military facilities, for example, can stay online while the Internet vanishes for everybody else.

Experts said it was too early to tell which, if any, facilities still have connections in Egypt.
Cowie said his firm is investigating clues that a small number of small networks might still be available.

Meanwhile, a program Renesys uses that displays the percentage of each country that is connected to the Internet was showing a figure that he was still struggling to believe. Zero.