EGYPT: solving it through violence
- Thread starter Grapes Of Wrath
- Start date
Amid Digital Blackout, Anonymous Mass-Faxes WikiLeaks Cables To Egypt
Jan. 28 2011 - 1:46 pm
Update below with other activist efforts to offer Egyptians Internet access.
Egypt has dropped a digital iron curtain over its Internet. So WikiLeaks’ fans are using an analog tool to smuggle the secret-spilling site’s latest scandals into the country: fax machines.
On Friday afternoon, the loose hacker group Anonymous began a campaign to fax thousands of copies of WikiLeaks’ latest missives–a series of State Department cables revealing human rights abuses under Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and tacit U.S. backing for his administration–to Egyptian numbers.
Since Thursday night, Egypt has blocked its four largest Internet service providers, Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, and Etisalat Misr. But landlines remain connected–and so, Anonymous believes, do landline-connected fax machines. “We stand up for the little guy as well as fighting the government,” one source within Anonymous writes to me. “We believe the people need to see the truth, which is why we’re faxing locations in Egypt (especially schools) with copies of a relevant WikiLeaks cable; due to the majority of Egyptian Internet being down, the public cannot access this vital information.”
On a crowdsourced document that the group uses for planning, members listed fax numbers of half a dozen Egyptian schools as their first targets. “The idea is to distribute the information to students, who can then share it with others,” says another source within Anonymous. “Right now they need to know that the police cannot be trusted and the wikileaks cables are just more proof of that.”