Check This out.Conditions in Egypt continue to unravel, with at least 45 people across the country dead in related violence since Friday, according to health ministry officials. President Hosni Mubarak's desperate attempt to hold onto power by firing his cabinet -- but not himself -- didn't cut it with the thousands of protesters who have flooded the streets of Cairo and other cities demanding an end to his 30-year rule. Poverty, government corruption and human rights abuses are among the conditions demonstrators want to see ended.
President Obama voiced support for the protesters' goals yesterday, but Mubarak has been a longtime-ally of the U.S. Given the fact that Egypt is home to the Suez canal, a key transit point for oil and fuel shipments between the Persian Gulf and the Western hemisphere, how far will the U.S. be willing to go to support the Egyptian people's desire for change?
Guess Who the Egyptian Government blames for a lot of this uproar? Drum roll please...Bloggers, Facebook users , Twitter users and You Tube!! Not the fact that you have college educated young people who can't find jobs and have been un-employed for awhile.
It used to be...You could shut down or take control of the newspapers and television stations and radio stations and control the news or at least quiet the news..but now of days, everybody is carrying a smart phone an ipod, an ipad, an android, a blackberry....a netbook, a laptop...People are communicating with each other on trains, in coffee shops, in the streets in apartments, et al
and over state and international lines.
Damn shame...Everybody's phone has a camera...Even a video camera in some cases....This is truly the information age and you can't police or corral everybody...So guess what? naturally, the
Egyptian government wants to do what they did in Iran about a year ago when they were having trouble.. Block Facebook, Twitter and youtube. Shut down the internet.
Internet and cell phone data services were disrupted across Egypt as authorities used extreme measures to hamper protesters from organizing mass rallies after noon prayers Friday as part of the biggest challenge to the government in decades.
In response to the threat, Egypt apparently has done what many technologists thought was unthinkable for any country with a major Internet economy: cutting itself off from the Web to try to silence protesters. ("Yeah, that'll quiet the bloody bastards")
Withholding the Internet in Egypt is relatively easy, compared with other more democratic countries. For one thing, there are only four major ISPs, each of which has relatively few routers connecting them to the outside world. By comparison, anyone who wanted to shut down the Internet in the United States would have to deal with many different companies. And while Egypt can legally disable telecom companies by executive decree, American companies might fall under various regulatory umbrellas that limit the government's power to disrupt communication channels.
Members of our own Congress have proposed creating a "kill switch" that would shut down the Internet at the push of a button in the case of a "cyber security emergency," but erecting such a blockade would be logistically difficult. It would also be kind of unconstitutional too...but that's just me saying that.
I'll however say this about all of that...There were revolutions before we had the internet...before we had the computer as we know it today...before we had telephones and the telegraph...Cutting off the internet won't stop people from standing up to a corrupt government that isn't serving their basic needs....How bout cleaning up the corruption? How bout creating some jobs, straightening out the economy?, How about bending to the will of the people?? (Am I talking about Egypt or America???? I'm getting carried away here!)
Nahh...That's too much like right...It's easier to kill the internet!
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