Egypt's Assault on Information: As Unamerican as...America?

Unless you've been living in a cave the last week or so, you've heard about the demonstrations (revolution?) going on in Egypt. This post isn't really about the protests themselves. It's about governmental assaults on information as a crackdown measure (with Egypt's being the most current). As a practical matter, any autocratic regime will suppress communication in a time of insurrection. It's been done throughout history, and this is no different, other than it being in the information age. Interestingly, these protests were reportedly even organized on Facebook, so that seems like an even more logical target. (See, it can be used for political protests more extensive than changing a profile picture.) And unlike the Iran protests, in which there was no "Twitter revolution" (all the tweets were in English, not Farsi, and came from this hemisphere), Twitter seems to be in legitimate use here.

So of course, what did the Egyptian government do in response? Shut down the internet:

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.

Other countries, such as Iran during their election protests, and China after riots, have also resorted to shutting off the internet to quash dissent.

While it's easy to dismiss this as being a world away, the U.S. government has been trying to gain the capability to do the same thing here:

In what has to be the ultimate irony or simply bad timing, the United States is in the midst of revisiting the creation of an internet kill switch to defend against cyber warfare just as Egypt on Friday moved to block internet access to stem free speech.

I don't know that this is ironic, since the U.S. wants it for the same reason as Egypt, but rather just brazenly honest about the point. I mean, what the government has said until this point is that (surprise, surprise) it's needed to "protect against significant cybercrime threats to national security." Computer security expert Bruce Schneier has written about this:

Yes, the bad guys use the Internet to communicate, and they can use it to attack us. But the good guys use it, too, and the good guys far outnumber the bad guys.

Shutting the Internet down, either the whole thing or just a part of it, even in the face of a foreign military attack would do far more damage than it could possibly prevent. And it would hurt others whom we don't want to hurt.

For years we've been bombarded with scare stories about terrorists wanting to shut the Internet down. They're mostly fairy tales, but they're scary precisely because the Internet is so critical to so many things.

Why would we want to terrorize our own population by doing exactly what we don't want anyone else to do? And a national emergency is precisely the worst time to do it.

Someone in the U.S. government must understand this, so there can be only one reason I imagine that they would want this capability: more control, the ability to quash a potential uprising here.

In further news, just this morning it was reported that Egypt has shut down Al Jazeera's branch in Cairo:

The Egyptian authorities are revoking the Al Jazeera Network's licence to broadcast from the country, and will be shutting down its bureau office in Cairo, state television has said.

"The information minister [Anas al-Fikki] ordered ... suspension of operations of Al Jazeera, cancelling of its licences and withdrawing accreditation to all its staff as of today," a statement on the official Mena news agency said on Sunday.

(But they're planning on staying anyway, so good for them.)

Sadly, even the isolation and removal of a news network - Al Jazeera, specifically - is not a problem of a far away land. The only difference is that here it's done by the cooperation of private corporations rather than the government itself. (We ostensibly have that pesky First Amendment protecting us.) On Friday, Salon's Julia Dahl did a report on Al Jazeera English, and the fact that none of our major cable networks carry it. Here's a snippet:

Though approximately 120 million homes from Jerusalem to Jakarta to Germany tune in to AJE every day, the station has been all but shut out of the U.S. market. Unless you live in Burlington, Vt., or Northeast Ohio, where two local cable networks defied the industry by adding the channel to their line-ups, the only way to see the channel’s programming is on YouTube, or by paying for either a subscription broadband service or a satellite dish from French company GlobeCast. In Washington, D.C., a tiny satellite company called Washington Cable has the channel available, but so far, its customers -- several government agencies, as well as a small number of apartment complexes, including the famed Watergate -- don’t want it.

...

Though spokespeople from TimeWarner, Comcast, and News Corp (which owns DirecTV) refused to speak in any detail about their decision not to carry the channel, those with knowledge of the industry say AJE never had a chance on U.S. soil.

...

[A]ny American love for the channel was lost on September 11, 2001. Suddenly, Al Jazeera was accused of being a mouthpiece for the enemy for airing video of Osama bin Laden and showing graphic images of injured and dead American servicemen. (Ironically, when Burns wrote about Al Jazeera two years earlier he noted that the channel had been accused by some in the Arab world of being "a mouthpiece for American ideas.")

Even though Al Jazeera is doing yeomen's work in reporting the Egyptian protests, none of us in the U.S. can see it, primarily because of the views expressed on the network. Last week I wrote about the dangers of vertical integration of the media--this is the same evil, but from mere horizontal media conglomeration - there are fewer networks, so there's a chance a particular viewpoint will be shut out altogether. And while antitrust law prohibits collusion for profit, nothing prohibits collusion for silencing dissent, nor do they need to collude to all decide to avoid controversial news. This isn't hypothetical. This is already real.

So basically, the internet and press conditions used only to suppress dissent and support autocratic regimes either already exist or will soon exist is the U.S. if the government has its way. We've seen who wants to do these things and why, and yet, no one seems able to stop it in the U.S. This is obviously anti-democratic, and just as obviously, intolerable.