The Internet Gives and the Internet Takes away is probably how I can sum up the situation in Egypt. What is crazy about the internet shutdown in Egypt was the absolute cut-off that has occurred. When drafting this 90% of Egypt is disconnected from the rest of the world.
Makes you want to make sure you hold on to some old school modems and hope that some ISP’s in other countries have services you can connect to with dial up have that list of ISPs handy. With the precedence the Egyptian Government has made in shutting down mobile and Internet service it really makes you think.
Not saying it could happen here in the United States, but if I was a doom and gloom type person these actions would make me want to hang on to some modems and keep a land line, things would have to get pretty bad for any government to shut down regular telephone service. Keep this in mind, if they are willing to kill the Internet I am sure it will not be long before they would kill international calling as well.
The only sure fire way to stay online would be to have a Satellite Internet connection connected to a service provider in another country. I am sure what we see post shut down is going to shock us, as the digital age where everyone has a camera in their pocket is going to record everything that happened. The news is going to get out regardless but this crackdown is Egypt’s way of trying to prevent people from organizing.
Can you imagine this happening in America? People would be exercising their rights to carry and bear arms.