Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Protesters, criminals get around government censors using secret Web network

TorFile:Mårten Eskil Winge - Tor's Fight with the Giants - Google Art Project.jpgBy Andrew Conte As hundreds of thousands protested for democracy during the 2011 Arab Spring uprising, Egyptian authorities cut access to Twitter to prevent demonstrators from quickly communicating.
Protesters then flocked to Facebook, where — in the two hours before the government blocked that social media site — they could find instructions on how to avoid government scrutiny of their electronic communications by accessing the “hidden Internet.”
In that time, hundreds of people learned how to get on Tor , an online network created by the U.S. government that allows people to surf the Web anonymously, beyond the reach of government censors.
The number of Tor users in Egypt quadrupled over the following days to more than 2,000 — until the authorities shut down Web access.
“They realized the core activists that they wanted to prevent from communicating were communicating anyway,” said Rasha Abdulla, a journalism professor at The American University in Cairo who joined the protests two years ago. “It gives you an idea of how freaked out the regime was. You don't go to that kind of extreme unless you really feel that you're falling apart.”
Now after revelations about widespread U.S. government surveillance of social media and cellphone records, Egyptians are able to lecture Americans about Internet privacy. What once seemed unnecessary to most Americans might make sense, even to people not doing anything illegal or even embarrassing.
More than 80,000 people in the United States log onto the Tor network to access the Web each day, according to its metrics . Edward Snowden, a former employee of a U.S. government contractor who leaked information about U.S. intelligence agency snooping, had a Tor sticker on his laptop...Read here...
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