By 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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