Posts Tagged ‘internet’

VIDEO – TEData #egyworkers on strike إضراب عمال تي إي داتا

Around 400 technicians at TEData, the biggest internet service provider in Egypt, are currently on strike, over job security.

Egypt: Revolution in Motion

Western Mubaraks

Britain threatens to shut down social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, or banning suspected “rioters” from using them. In New York, the “NYPD has formed a new unit to track troublemakers who announce plans or brag about their crimes on Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.” While in California…

A rail transit provider in the United States disabled mobile phone services to prevent a planned protest on Thursday, attracting criticism and unflattering comparisons to crackdowns on dissent in the Middle East.
Demonstrators in northern California’s Bay Area had planned a protest to condemn the shooting death of Charles Hill, who was killed on July 3 after Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officers responded to complaints about a drunk man at a station in the city of San Francisco.

Mubarak and Adly are indeed an inspiration to their counterparts in the West.

Tweeting about a revolution: Social media and social movements

Diagram: Egypt’s #Jan25 telecommunication shutdown

Activist Ramy Raoof has put together a timeline of the state’s telecommunication shutdown during the uprising. Click on the diagram above to enlarge.

Mubarak, Nazif, Adly fined for communications cut, but what about the rest?

The Administrative court fined Mubarak, former PM Nazif and former interior minister Habib el-Adly LE540 millions for cutting the internet during the revolution. However, the mobile phone operators, which I regard as complicit, are off the hook and will even receive compensations:

Telecoms operator Vodafone said in January it and other mobile operators had no option but to comply with an order from the authorities to suspend services in selected areas of the country during the peak of the anti-government demonstrations.
In February, Vodafone also accused the authorities of using its network to send pro-government text messages to subscribers.
Communications and Information Technology Minister Maged Othman said his ministry planned to pay compensation estimated at around 100 million pounds to mobile telecoms operators for losses caused by the service disruption, the state news agency MENA said. It said the figure was reached by independent bodies.

The operators have had a moral obligation to say no. And no matter what “national security” obligations they signed onto when receiving their license from the state, they could have sent out warnings to the millions of customers prior to cutting the service, which could have saved lives.

And if Mubarak, Nazif and Adly were found found guilty, what about Mubarak’s minister of telecommunication, Tarek Kamel? Not only is he off the hook, but he’s been rewarded a seat in the NTRA board of directors, where General Rushdi el-Qamari still keeps his position.

The money should not go to the companies. The money should be go to the families of the martyrs and injured whose lives could have been saved if the telecommunication network was up and running during the uprising.

Surveillance chiefs to remain in service

From SS Officers

The National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority NTRA has reshuffled its board, and guess what? Not only did SS General Rushdi el-Qamari keep his post, as the interior ministry’s representative on its board, but also Tarek Kamel, Mubarak’s infamous minister of telecommunications, has joined! You can find both their names on the official website of NTRA.

What kind of sick musical chairs game is going on here? How can the orchestrators of Mubarak’s crackdown on telecommunications during the uprising be rewarded posts in the new revolutionary Egypt?

UK firm offered spying software to SS

Gamma’s Anti-Skype Finfisher Spy Software

Gamma International’s Finfisher program would have enabled government spies to monitor activists and censor websites, according to documents obtained by activists after storming State Security Police headquarters in Nasr City…

One of the papers, in English and headed Finfisher Proposal: Commercial Offer, contained an offer dated 29 June 2010 to provide “FinSpy” software, hardware, installation and training to the SSI for €287,000 (£255,000). The name on the invoice, dated Tuesday 29 June 2010, was Gamma International UK Limited.
Other documents, written in Arabic and marked “ultimately confidential”, state that after being offered a “free trial version” of Gamma’s Finfisher software to test its ability to hack into email accounts, the SSI concluded it was “a high-level security system” that could get into email accounts of Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo, as well as allowing “full control” of the computers of “targeted elements”. It went on to describe the software’s “success in breaking through personal accounts on Skype network, which is considered the most secure method of communication used by members of the elements of the harmful activity because it is encrypted”.

General Rushdi el-Qamari اللواء رشدي القمري

During the uprising, the regime took down the internet from the night of 27 January till 3 February, after blocking websites like Twitter and Facebook on the previous day. The government also took down the mobile phone networks and SMS, with the complicity of the three operators Mobinil, Vodafone Egypt and Etisalat, as well as internet service providers like TE DATA.

The government body that orchestrated the blackout was the National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority (NTRA), headed by the former Telecommunication Minister Tarek Kamel (whose brother Cairo University President Hossam Kamel is currently the target of an impeachment campaign by faculty staff and student protesters over his ties to the Mubarak regime), together with representatives from the police, Mukhabarrat and government officials.

From SS Officers

The Interior Ministry’s representative on the board of NTRA during the revolution was General Rushdi el-Qamari, whose profile pictures I found on the Nasr City SS DVDs.

Little I managed to find out about the career of General Rushdi Mohamed Sayyed Ahmad el-Qamari, before he became the head of the General Administration of Police Communications in July 2010. But usually heads of such sensitive departments in the interior ministry come from the ranks of State Security Police, especially as he assumed the membership of the NTRA board, sharing seats with the Mukhabarrat.

Essam Sharaf’s cabinet has come out few days ago saying the regime’s shutting down of telecommunications was “inappropriate.” But has anyone been held accountable? What happened to NTRA board members, including General Qamari? Have they been investigated? Do they still keep their posts? Or are we continuing with the musical chairs game?

London Mini Marxism Festival: Gigi

Gigi speaking in London…