Egypt & Freedom Online

Photo by Muhammad Ghafari — Some Rights Reserved

You can’t be free if you are not free to connect. Fortunately, sometimes government thuggery can lead to popular creativity.

As events continue to unfold in Egypt, the online community has been been providing more than just on the ground reporting; also circulating is information on how to get around the government’s takedown of internet and mobile access.

Here are some of the more creative and comprehensive resources:

Shervin Pishevar has created OPENMESH as a forum to exchange workarounds to these government communication crackdowns.

ReadWrite’s Hack channel follows the increased use of Tor and other solutions. Tor is a free and open source network that helps users escape from surveillance.

Wired’s How-to-Wiki is collecting recommendations, which ran the gamut from citizens band radio to ad-hoc networking to satellite phones.

We Rebuild Interfax is a community of net activists devoted to internet access for everyone, everywhwere.

Manal and Alaa’s “free speech from the bletches” proposes easy methods using good ol’ dial-up.

And, Global Voices has a special Egypt Protests 2011 section that is collecting a significant amount of on the ground reporting, news stories, global information and online resources.

When will governments realize that silence is no longer an option?

- Bill Reichblum

This entry was posted on Monday, January 31st, 2011 at 12:01 am and is filed under On Culture - . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.