Egypt has dropped a digital iron curtain over its Internet. So WikiLeaks’ fans are using an analog tool to smuggle the secret-spilling site’s latest scandals into the country: fax machines.
On Friday afternoon, the loose hacker group Anonymous began a campaign to fax thousands of copies of WikiLeaks’ latest missives–a series of State Department cables revealing human rights abuses under Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and tacit U.S. backing for his administration–to Egyptian numbers.
Since Thursday night, Egypt has blocked its four largest Internet service providers, Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, and Etisalat Misr. But landlines remain connected–and so, Anonymous believes, do landline-connected fax machines. “We stand up for the little guy as well as fighting the government,” one source within Anonymous writes to me. “We believe the people need to see the truth, which is why we’re faxing locations in Egypt (especially schools) with copies of a relevant WikiLeaks cable; due to the majority of Egyptian Internet being down, the public cannot access this vital information.”
On a crowdsourced document that the group uses for planning, members listed fax numbers of half a dozen Egyptian schools as their first targets. “The idea is to distribute the information to students, who can then share it with others,” says another source within Anonymous. “Right now they need to know that the police cannot be trusted and the wikileaks cables are just more proof of that.”
Update: As a commenter notes, another activist group calling itself Telecomix is also faxing messages to Egypt, offering its own Internet access points to anyone in the country with a dial-up modem. They’ve also announced they’re monitoring Ham radio frequencies to pick up messages from any Egyptians who want to broadcast messages.
Update again: Now Anonymous and Telecomix seem to have joined forces to offer Egyptians Internet access via foreign landlines. They’ve listed dozens of numbers that offer connections in this document.
Just what impact Anonymous’ WikiLeak faxes might have isn’t clear, given that thousands of young Egyptians are already on the streets and experiencing human rights abuses firsthand–not sitting in their offices waiting by the fax machine. But just as WikiLeaks may have helped inspire Tunisia’s non-violent ouster of its ruler Ben Ali earlier this month, the latest WikiLeaks documents could help dispel any remaining illusions Egyptians have about their government and its police force, which frequently tortures and brutalizes suspects and dissidents, according to the leaked cables.
The campaign also shows that Anonymous may be evolving its political tools, after campaigns that used denial-of-service attacks to take down websites of Mastercard, Paypal, and some Tunisian government sites, and led to the arrest of five suspected participants in those attacks around the U.K. earlier Friday. The Egyptian government, after all, just performed a massive denial of service attack on its entire Internet. Anonymous, for a change, is working to provide, rather than deny information.
Anonymous’s fax tactics hark back to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing, when student protestors used faxes to communicate with Chinese-Americans in the U.S. and get out word of the bloody crackdown. In the analog world that Egypt’s government has imposed on its citizens, that tool may be as effective as ever.