The Role Of Anonymity During The Arab Spring In Egypt

Introduction

In this paper, we will talk about the role of anonymity in countries with dictatorship as a mean of resistance against surveillance. In order to do that, we will analyse the case of Egypt during the protests of the Arab Spring. In fact, the year 2011 was marked by many protests in North Africa and the Middle East region, it was the beginning of the 'Arab Spring'. Those events triggered a string 1 of impact in the region which was mainly dominated by some dictators for a long time. With the protests against the regimes in the Maghreb and the Middle East, we witnessed a high level of violence during this period. In the one hand, the protests occurring against national regimes were extremely intense, but in the other hand, those same regimes used plenty of extremely repressive measures stop as fast as possible the manifestations. However, the events in Egypt were a really interesting example of resistance using new technologies.

First of all, social media platforms were very useful tools for young bloggers, protesters or activists to organise themselves efficiently against the presidency of Hosni Mubarak. Indeed, lots of protesters have been orchestrating the events using the features of Facebook, Twitter or even YouTube. However, their actions could be possibly traced by the Egyptian government who was determined to identify opposant to shut down all kind of protestation in Cairos.

Moreover, it is important to notice that the main messages exchanged online between protesters were not encrypted again surveillance and this was a huge issue regarding online and offline anonymity and the potential consequences. In fact, the Egyptian regime of Hosni Mubarak censored lots of websites, tried to identify the opposant online and prosecuted them offline. Because of this repression, it became absolutely necessary for the activists to hide their personal identity on the Internet. In a nutshell, communicating anonymously for an activist, a blogger or a citizen became the norm in order to avoid being identified and captured by the Egyptian government.

The aim of this paper is to question the role of anonymity in a tense political context. In this paper, firstly we will do a quick review on the events in Egypt regarding the internet shutdown, secondly we will examine the potential consequences a lack of anonymity in Egypt, thirdly, we will review the alternative used by Egyptian activists to empower their online anonymity.

Political Context and Online Services

Before we talk about the role of anonymity during the protests, let us come back to the main key facts that pushed the Egyptian activists protect their online anonymity. In fact, many citizens from the Maghreb region (Egypt, Tunisia, Libya) witnessed lots of shutdowns by their respective governments. First of all, during the beginning of the Arab Spring in Egypt, the most popular 2 websites used by Egyptian citizens started be blocked and it became impossible to have access to it.

To begin, on January 25th 2011, the State Security Investigations Service (the highest national 3 4 internal security authority in Egypt) ordered Twitter to be shut down allover Egypt. Since this date, absolutely no traffic coming from the Twitter servers or going to the servers were sent during the protests. The day after, Facebook was also closed in Egypt. And by the end of January almost the entire Internet of Egypt was completely shut down.

But this shutdown also touched all the SMS and mobile devices system. Many features or app were blocked on the phones and other services such as What’s App were targeted as well by the regime. Moreover, Renesys, one of the big firm that manage the Internet distribution system in Egypt, reported that all routes to Egyptian servers were taken down at the same moment. Consequently, all Egyptian servers and networks that were absolutely crucial to provide internet access were completely dependent to servers based outside of Egypt. To resume economically this unique situation, the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) estimated the average cost of the Internet shutdown in Egypt around 90 million €. They took into account the lack of revenues coming from telecommunication or other internet services, which were totally lost.

The Consequences of a Lack of Anonymity

During the Arab spring in Egypt, activists made extensive use of tools such as Facebook to organise themselves, spread their events, diffuse information about the regime, plan manifestation and fight the regime of Hosni Mubarak. But as we said it before, the level of censorship on the internet escalated very quickly. But censorship wasn’t the only concern, the Egyptian government took also many actions to avoid all type of communication between activists and with foreign media looking for informations. With a massive surveillance, a lack of Internet freedom and a fear of becoming identified as an activist, it was the main strategy employed by authorities to stop all the protests. Indeed, the government in Egypt used the law and the force to control what was being posted, but also who posted this kind of content. But they also used technology, for instance, we can cite the American company Narus, a subsidiary of Boeing Corporation. This American company who sold to the Egyptian government a “real-time traffic intelligence” equipment that helped the regime to identify different dissidents. Now owned by Boeing, Narus was founded in 5 1997 by Security researchers from Israel who created and sold mass surveillance technologies for governments and other corporate clients.

During this tense period, online anonymity was particularly important if you didn’t want to get in trouble for the things that you posted. Posts, photo or videos about events that you had seen or witnessed was dangerous for all type of activists. Indeed, we know that autocratic government are always trying to disable anonymous communication by their citizens and even more for journalists, bloggers or activists. Without a strong online anonymity, this can have a sad impact in real life on the ability for people to organise a political movement against the regime. Indeed, anonymity allows individuals to express themselves without fear of reprisal, and is particularly important in countries where freedom of expression is heavily censored. It allows whistleblowers to come forward and individuals to reveal their concerns on multiple issues in online chat rooms. It also allows users to easily join any type of discussion they might be tempted to avoid.

Alternatives against Surveillance to Reinforce Online Anonymity

For the citizens, in order to defend themselves from police arrestation and harassment, some users had taken technical precautions when posting on the Internet. According to an interview of 6 Jacob Applebaum (an American journalist, computer security researcher and hacker also known for representing WikiLeaks) a small part of protesters tried to use encryption technology during the protest to hide their online activity. However, the vast majority of the citizens didn’t. In order to simplify the need of online anonymity, the software Tor was one of the mains tools used by activists, bloggers and journalists.

Tor is a decentralised network of servers managed by volunteers in order to anonymize Internet connections. Tor started to become very popular since the revelations of Edward Snowen in 2013. In June 2017, the number of Tor users is estimated at 2,375,000 per day. The principle of Tor was developed in the 90’ by American researchers (Paul Syverson, Michael G. Reed and David Goldschlag) with the aim of protecting communications from internet surveillance and traffic analysis. Traffic analysis is often used to determine who is communicating with whom on a public network. Knowing the source and destination of your traffic can help people track down your behaviour and interests.

We all carry mobile devices or computers, and many of the things we do on our devices can possibly be tracked on a daily basis. For example, when someone use a software like Tor, if you want to read informations on the BBC about the presidency of Hosni Mubarak without anyone knowing it, the BBC would only see someone from the Tor network on their website. On the other hand Tor would not know who you are and from where you are attempting to access this website. Tor is designed in such a way nobody can identify you, thus you won't have any linkability browsing from a website to another.

During the protests in Egypt, many Facebook pages and blogger’s websites of famous activists were hijacked by government agents to deactivate them. Even if no propaganda was diffused in Facebook pages during the hijacking, some activists found their content deleted. What was different from other types hijackings, is the number and the speed of which all the accounts were hijacked.

Considering the limited nature of the legal protection of anonymity in Egypt, in particular during the protests, Tor was the best alternative for them to protect their identity from the Egyptian government, and keeping them safe offline. Thanks to tools such as Tor, activists had now access to the Deepweb. The Deepweb was originally created to help Chinese dissidents to communicate between each other without being identified and without fearing the Chinese government. The creation of the Deepweb allowed them with the rest of the world, but also to have a real anonymity in a country with a massive surveillance system. Thus, they can to follow the informations anonymously through the Web without risking for their life or to be intimidated.

The usage of Tor increased a lot during the protests going from an average of 50 users to nearly 700 users in middle January in Cairos. Some statistic hasve been published on the website metrix. torproject. org. Many people used other tools, such as virtual private networks, Freenet (similar to Tor) and so on… But Tor worked very well against the kind of very specific censorship that the Egyptian regime deployed. In a nutshell, Egyptian knew that when they will install and use Tor, they would be able to do things:

• Overcome the censorship by the government
• Keeping their anonymity to do activism against the regime.

Because the main social media on the web (Twitter, Facebook) were completely blocked, and anonymity wasn’t respected when acting as an activist, Installing Tor as a proxy on the browser was great step forward for the anonymity online.

Conclusion

The protection of anonymity is a crucial component of the protection of the right to freedom of speech and the right to privacy. Anonymity and data encryption are not new debates. Anonymity facilitate the expression of controversial ideas and dissent in many countries around the world. In addition, the use of encrypted messages and codes to protect the privacy of communications is also the subject of much debate.

In this case, anonymity was the key factor to enable freedom of speech in Egypt or in other countries with dictatorship and surveillance. Without this incentive provided by a software such as Tor, it was quite impossible to overcome the censorship and protect his life as an activist. In this sense, anonymity protects the freedom of individuals to communicate and ideas, but it also protects the freedom of individuals to live their lives without unnecessary or disproportionate control.