Egyptians Turn To Tor To Organize Dissent Online 152
An anonymous reader writes "Even as President Obama prepares to follow Mubarak with his own 'internet kill switch', Egyptians were turning to the Tor anonymiser to organise their protests online. The number of Egyptians connecting to the internet over Tor rose more than five-fold after protests broke out last week before crashing when the Government severed links to the global internet. Information security researcher, Tor coder and writer of the bridge that allowed Egypt's citizens to short-circuit government filters, Jacob Appelbaum, told SC Magazine Egyptians were 'concerned and some understand the risk of network traffic analysis.' Appelbaum has himself been the subject of attention from US security services who routinely snatch his electronics and search his belongings when he re-enters the country and who subpoenaed his private Twitter account last December." Which helps explain why Appelbaum is helping to organize a small fundraiser to get more communications gear into Egypt.
Re:I'm Confused (Score:4, Informative)
I'm a little confused. How does Tor work when they shut down the Internet?
From the summary:
Egyptians were turning to the Tor anonymiser to organise their protests online.
I presume they meant prior to their loss of connection. Of course a headline of "Egyptians Were Using Tor to Organise Dissent Online" would be much less dramatic.
Re:I'm Confused (Score:5, Informative)
Your donation will go to providing satellite internet devices, other related equipment, to help with network access costs,and general support for Egyptians and people working with Egypt during this crisis and beyond.
Not very hard to find an answer.
Instead of an invoice for my 3 minutes of searching, may I kindly ask you to go to the posted link, fill in the form and hit the "Donate" button.
Thank you.
It's further proof. (Score:4, Informative)
Proof that anyone using a Tor is a criminal with something to hide. They just happen to be breaking Egyption laws instead of US ones. The scumbags. [/end sarcasm]
Re:Net kill switch (Score:5, Informative)
I can't see how this would help in the US
You're misunderstanding what the "kill switch" legislation is. It's not technical. It's a legal mechanism by which the administration can tell services (including operations like Twitter or Google, or just Google's Gmail service, or an entire ISP, or just one blog site), software vendors, or individual engineers that they must take a specific action as required during an emergency. It's no different that the government's already existing ability to commandeer ham radio equipment, or cruise ships, or food distribution companies. If they think that a dozen people are waiting for instructions via Twitter to time their dropping off of backpack bombs on subway trains all around the country, then the "kill switch" is invoked: federal power to tell Twitter to shut down or otherwise do what they say has to be done. The legislation lays out penalties for failure to comply with such orders.
This doesn't give the president a button to push. It gives him lawyers to push, in real time, on short notice.
Obama is now a Republican? (Score:2, Informative)
Um...how does Senator Susan Collins, Republican from Main, putting forward a beyond-all-reason-lame bill, somehow equal Obama following Mubarak? Yes, the bill is to give the president the time power to kill the Internet in various poorly defined ways, but that's one amazingly long politically reaching spin if I ever heard one.
Revolution Radio (Score:4, Informative)
Get some 100 watt FM transmitters make a afsk broadcast(Setting up Soundmodem on Linux). Next plug headphone jack from fm radio into laptop use multimon or windows equivalent. Just have to coordinate freq maybe could try encrypting it with open-ssh and sharing certs
WTF this is an obvious troll (Score:5, Informative)
When has president Obama suggested an Internet kill switch? This is the idea of a Republican senator and has not been endorsed or supported by Obama, afaik. This should have never made it to the front page, it is an obvious troll.