As the year draws to a close, EFF is looking back at the major trends influencing digital rights in 2013 and discussing where we are in the fight for free expression, innovation, fair use, and privacy. Click here to read other blog posts in this series.
Prior to January 2011, national or regional Internet “blackouts” were mostly unheard of.
Although the Maldives, Nepal, Burma, and China all preceded Egypt with this innovation, it was the shutdown initiated by former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak that set a new precedent and garnered global media coverage.
Since then, Syria, Libya, and even San Francisco’s BART police have “pulled a Mubarak.”
But in 2013, Internet blackouts became de rigeur for embattled governments:
The Syrian Internet has seen numerous outages throughout the year, some of which appear to be politically motivated and others of which may be structural.
In October, Aleppo was without Internet for 17.5 hours, while in early December, the entire country’s Internet went down for a few hours.
Politically-motivated Internet outages are certainly trending.
For governments, they pose an all-too-tempting way of stifling speech and keeping order during periods of protest or unrest, but as the BART telecommunications shutdown in San Francisco demonstrated, they can also prevent urgent communications from getting through and therefore may not be worth the risks they pose, even to the most despotic of regimes.
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