In Egypt: Access denied

Riots and unrest in Egypt have been ongoing all week, but theInternet only seemed to take notice when it affected the Internet.On Friday, news reports revealed that the government had shut downInternet access to its 80 million citizens, also blocking textmessaging and mobile services. Access to the outside world was gone,as was the ability to organize protests from within.

Tech blog Mashable.com quickly put up a graphic to help readersvisualize the blockage. Online vigilante group Anonymous - mostrecently in the news for its WikiLeaks hacktivism - threatened toattack the government's portals, anonymously.

No Internet? It's a thought so large and abstract as to be nearlyunfathomable (How exactly do you "shut down" the Internet? With agiant pair of scissors - snip, snip, snip? Blogs quickly beganexploring that question, too.)

Online communities had similar reactions of revulsion in 2007when the government of Burma (also known as Myanmar) closed offInternet access - images of protesting monks had begun to leak tothe outside world; it didn't look good. Following the Iranianpresidential election in 2009, Twitterers worldwide changed theirlocations to "Tehran" after news broke that the government wascracking down on Iranian Twitter accounts.

The most recent events in Egypt caused some to ponder a questionthat, on its face, sounds ludicrous: Has society reached the pointat which Internet access is a basic human right? Is this publicoutcry just 21st-century indignation - one born of a world where"social networking" is nearly always something that happens in frontof a screen?

Only in a land of First World concerns could the lack of Internetaccess be considered a violation of basic rights. They have nobread? Let them eat Google.

But it's not the loss of Flickr pages and Tumblogs and Sad Keanusthat constitutes human rights abuse. Not really. "It's the idea offreedom of expression and information that's a human right," saysArvind Ganesan, who has researched Internet censorship as thedirector of business and human rights at the Human Rights Watch.It's right there in Article 19 of the U.N. Universal Declaration ofHuman Rights: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion andexpression; this right includes freedom . . . to seek, receive andimpart information and ideas through any media and regardless offrontiers."

The chilling aspect of an Internet clampdown is the assumptionthat lies behind it: If you will not let your people tweet, whatelse will you not let them do?

"Over the past 10 years, we've changed our media environment tostrongly emphasize on-the-ground, eyewitness voices," says EthanZuckerman, a researcher with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internetand Society. "It feels very strange not to be able to check abroadcast report for 'authentic' voices from on the ground."

The modern Internet has made us untrustworthy of sources that aretoo "official." Shutting it down causes one to recall nearly extinctIron Curtain oppression: the misinformation, the not-knowing,letters being secreted across borders at risk of imprisonment. Thisoutrage over the Egyptians losing their Internet access isn't a newthing at all. Or, as says Chris Csikszentmihalyi, the director ofthe Center for Future Civic Media at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology: "The point is not that the Internet has become sacred.The point is that human rights have always been sacred."

Some futurists have recently begun to suggest that the Internetand its assorted devices are not merely tools for human use, butrather the future of human evolution. They are the caches we use -via Facebook photos, blog entries, saved Google chats - to storememories and information - they are the appendages that humans willuse to expand our brains. If you subscribe to this rather extremephilosophy, then denial of Internet is not only denial ofcommunication but a denial of modern selfhood.

Then again, humans adapt.

"It really scared people this morning when their phones andInternet stopped working," writes Human Rights Watch's emergenciesdirector, Peter Bouckaert, via his BlackBerry. He was in theEgyptian city of Alexandria and had only sporadic messagingcapabilities, with no Internet or phone service. "They were suddenlycut off from their friends, and the rest of the world." But,Bouckaert writes, ultimately the government's obvious fear ofdissent may have emboldened its citizens. The people "also realizedhow afraid the regime must have been to shut down everything. In theend, it didn't stop them from protesting."

hessem@washpost.com