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.
