what the hell is going on in Egypt? Something about the internet?
Sunday, January 30, 2011
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I did a search of 'Egypt internet' and found this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/27/egypt-internet-goes-down-_n_815156.html
I thought the same thing the other day and then just went on to something else, lol.
Losing internet would suck though ;)
So, basically, the president of Egypt is a guy called Mubarak, who has now been in power for something like 30 years because he keeps rigging the election process. He is corrupt, is what I'm saying. Also, you know how when bad shit goes down in a country, that country can declare a state of emergency, which means the guy in charge is legally allowed to use censorship, prevent protest rallies and use excessive police powers? Well, Egypt has "technically" been in a state of emergency for all of Mubarak's presidency, because he kind of likes having those powers, and even though the original emergency has passed, he doesn't want to give them up.
Now, earlier in January, in a nearby country called Tunisia, they had a similar problem, viz: a president who had been in power and had stayed there by corrupt means for the better part of three decades. (The same thing is true, by the way, of a lot of other countries in the region, like Chad, Libya and Sudan.) And, being pretty fed up with this, the Tunisians had a peaceful revolution, one that's still sort of going on - a bad event triggered it, the death of a civilian, and people had had enough. But what they achieved was the ousting of their leader, and when a similar civilian death happened in Egypt, they looked at how Tunisia had gotten rid of their president and said that they'd had enough, too.
So they're having a revolution in Egypt. But because Mubarak still has those state of emergency powers, it's illegal for people to speak out against the government, or to march in protests, or do anything like that. But the people have been doing it anyway, and because a lot of the protesters are young, they've been using the internet - Facebook, blogs, Twitter - to organise the revolution. (The same thing has happened in Moldavia and Iran, recently, too: young protesters using the internet to rally because the older people in power don't know how to use it, and because it's easy and cheap and everyone has access.)
So, to cut a long story short, Mubarak has finally caught on to the whole revolutionaries-using-the-internet thing, and has therefore SHUT DOWN THE INTERNET in Egypt. The whole internet. And lots of people - both in Egypt and elsewhere - think this is a pretty shitty thing, and so are working to get it back on, or help the revolution in other ways.
So, yeah. That's basically what's going on in Egypt.
Oh shit.
That's...wow.
Thanks for breaking it down for me.
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