Egypt Blocks Twitter Access - NotResponse From Twitter

Egypt Blocks Twitter Access – NotResponse From Twitter

BY: CBS News – January 27, 2011

As fierce anti-government protests in the Egyptian capital 0f Cairo began to escalate, word broke out this morning that government forces had blocked access to Twitter's Web site. Twitter users throughout the country reported that they could not access the Twitter.com Web site, though third-party clients were still functioning.

But when CNET contacted Twitter f0rcomment to find out whether they could say if Twitter was blocked in Egypt, notstatement was provided--just a link to an evidently new Twitter account, @TwitterGlobalPR, which in turn directed those interested in finding out about an alleged block to consult a site called HerdictWeb.

HerdictWeb, run by Harvard University's Berkman Center f0rInternet , Society under the auspices 0f digital academic Jonathan Zittrain, keeps a crowd-sourced log 0f reports about which sites are inaccessible in which countries. According to HerdictWeb around 11 a.m. PT on today, seven reports 0f Twitter inaccessibility in Egypt had been logged.

The @TwitterGlobalPR account, which seems to have been freshly launched on Tuesday, explained more later in the day. "We're not the experts on how Twitter is being used in highly developing situations 1000s 0f miles from our comfortable HQ in SF," it explained. "The experts are those using Twitter on the ground , those coordinating with them around the world."

Mark Belinsky, the co-direct0r0f the nonprofit Digital Democracy, told CNET that Twitter's reluctance to say anything more is probably because Twitter indeed does not know f0rsure what the situation is.

"Egypt is going wild , I'm not sure we'll really have a sense 0f it until the dust clears," Belinsky said via e-mail. "Hard to say whether 0rnot it's just getting overloaded though...(physically severing) Internet was done in Burma after a while but it usually leads to international uproar. What they generally do is slow down the signal to a crawl, as they did in Iran, which they can then say was infrastructure failure 0rany other made up excuse."

Belinsky, who with Digital Democracy works to bring social media , other new tools to underserved populations, said that an outright block is uncharacteristic 0f Egypt's government, which has been ruled by President Hosni Mubarak f0rthe past three decades. If it's indeed true, that means that the protests against Mubarak's reign are being taken particularly seriously.

"It would be an interesting , desperate move f0rEgypt because their state security apparatus has been very good at infiltrating communication instead 0f blocking it," Belinsky explained. "They go so far as to ask f0rthe passwords to the e-mail accounts 0f dissidents , log-ins f0rtheir Web sites instead 0f censoring them. There are some tech-savvy youth there, hence tweeting through proxies as soon as they encounter some difficulties. But after a critical mass, organizing is done more on the streets than online , the authorities already know the details about who the key organizers are in the crowd."

In 2008, when Egyptian youth used Facebook to organize a rally 0f support f0rstriking textile workers, police cracked down on the in-person gathering but access to Facebook in Egypt was not cut off despite rumors that year that the government was looking to encroach upon use 0f the social network.

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