The authorities had made a similar decision in June after a Senegalese court handed Sonko a two-year prison sentence in absentia, a decision his supporters believed was a politically motivated attempt to prevent Sonko from running for president in 2024. At least 16 people died when Sonko’s supporters and Senegalese police clashed on the streets of the capital Dakar. The subsequent July protests left at least two people dead.

Last week, Sonko was hospitalized after going on a hunger strike to protest his arrest.  

“We fear the government,” Mohammed Diouf, a Dakar school teacher told me. “The government does not want the world to know what is happening in our country.” He said the internet shutdown left him unable to communicate with other protesters. “There is brutal oppression, and many young demonstrators have been killed and injured. The security forces use live fire, that is the situation,” said Diouf, who opted to use a pseudonym out of fear of reprisal.

On August 2, the day before Diouf and I spoke, the Senegalese government announced an indefinite ban on TikTok, the app that young people have been using to document violent encounters between demonstrators and the security apparatus.

Fueling public anger is a widely held fear that Senegalese President Macky Sall, currently serving his second term in office, may try to run for president again in 2024. In 2016, a public referendum on presidential term limits reset the period a president can stay in power to a maximum of two five-year terms. Sall, who had, at the time, begun serving his second term, argued that the constitutional amendment “reset the clock to zero,” making him eligible to run again. 

In an address to the nation after the June protests, Sall vowed he would not run for a third term. But experts say he is to blame for the ambiguity that has fueled unrest.

“This problem has to be put at the feet of Macky Sall. For a long time, he made the potential of him running for a third time ambiguous,” said Ibrahim Anoba, an African affairs analyst and a fellow at the Center for African Prosperity. “You can imagine what the populace will feel,” Anoba told me. “More so, if the president becomes intolerant of opposition leaders.” 

Current political anxieties have been compounded by the economic downturn resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic and the food shortages triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine. Senegal’s poverty rate was 36.3% in 2022, according to the World Bank, and the economy has also been hampered by rising debt.. 

The future looked much brighter in 2014, when newly discovered oil reserves appeared to set the stage for Senegal to become a major oil producer. But this oil, too, is now a source of public anxiety: Senegalese citizens fear that Sall will cede these riches to European companies.

Protesters, galvanized by Sonko amid concerns that Sall might indeed pursue a third term,  worried that Sall, a geological engineer before he became president, wanted to preside over the anticipated oil boom. It tipped public discontent into violent unrest, particularly among the country’s youth, who decried massive corruption, the overbearing influence of France and the slowdown of the economy. 

“We are fighting that the country retains the sovereignty of its wealth and natural resources which the government wants to sell off to oil firms. And for that, we will go until the end because it is our future that is at stake,” Diouf, the Dakar school teacher, told me. It is to Sonko that voters like Diouf look to reform Senegal’s system.

Sonko’s PASTEF party started in 2014 as a fringe party composed of political newcomers. Sonko, a young former tax inspector had shot to national recognition when he became a whistleblower in 2016, exposing the use of offshore tax havens by foreign companies to avoid paying taxes in Senegal. He became a member of the national assembly in 2017 and ran for president in 2019, trailing third behind Sall and Idrissa Seck Rewmi.

His criticism of Sall and his larger-than-life internet presence have endeared Sonko to young voters. He rapidly became the main threat to the ruling party. And it is that threat, say Sonko’s supporters, that is driving the criminal charges Sonko now faces, including rape (for which he was acquitted), formenting insurrection, creating political unrest, terrorism and theft.

State measures to control protests led by Sonko supporters have been violent and draconian. The internet shutdowns also pose a threat to Senegal’s already floundering economy. In the first quarter of 2023, Senegal’s unemployment rate stood at 21.5%, and Net Blocks estimates that each day without access to mobile internet costs the country nearly $8 million.

Financial and cryptocurrency trades, as well as ride hailing and e-commerce businesses, are all seeing losses due to the network shutdowns. “With the restriction of the internet that is becoming recurrent these days, we no longer have the opportunity to sell or buy USDT,” said Mady Dia, referring to Tether, a cryptocurrency “stablecoin” pegged to the U.S. dollar. “That is an abysmal shortfall,” Dia, who works with a cryptocurrency exchange, told me.

Dia and Diouf both said they’d withdrawn money when the protests began, expecting that the banks would likely close and that financial services would be crippled were the authorities to impose an internet shutdown. 

The political situation, Dia said, and the internet shutdowns have left him contemplating options for leaving Senegal altogether. 

“Many young people are ready to abandon their country if Sall remains in power in 2024,” he told me. In the past decade, thousands of young Senegalese have sought to move to Europe in search of better fortunes, often on small boats. These perilous journeys have claimed hundreds of lives. Last month, at least 15 people drowned after a boat carrying migrants and refugees capsized off the coast of Dakar.

In a West Africa beset by political instability – the most recent example being the coup in Niger – Senegal has been cited as a model of democracy. That reputation is starting to wear off. 

“This is really bad for the region itself,” said Anoba, the analyst at the Center for African Prosperity. “As you know, Macky Sall is one of the leading figures in West Africa, and right now [as] we are trying to quench the fires of coups that are changing the political terrain, this is the last thing we want.”

Threats against Senegalese media represent another sign of democratic backsliding in the country. In June, a television channel offering live coverage of the protests was suspended for 30 days. And Papa Ale Niang, a journalist with the prominent daily newspaper Dakarmatin, was charged on August 1, like Sonko, with “inciting insurrection.”

Internet shutdowns are also a sign of faltering democratic values. “Cutting off the internet is tantamount to denying the right to information, which is a constitutional principle, not to mention international laws,” said Emmanuel Diokh, the Senegal lead at Internet Sans Frontières, an international organization that defends access to the internet. 

Since 2017, internet shutdowns have become an increasingly common tactic of information and social control in Africa. Cameroon’s long-serving president, Paul Biya, imposed an internet ban in the English-speaking region of the country in 2017 that lasted three months. In 2019, Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa also imposed an internet shutdown in response to protests. Governments in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Equatorial Guinea have also imposed strict internet regulations in the past five years.

All of these countries have used the same rationale: The actions were intended to curb hate speech or to avoid the breakdown of order. Sall has shown one thing to the Senegalese people — the internet is not safe from government control. Instead of curbing hate speech, shutting down the internet is a sign that he is prepared to use any means necessary to decimate the opposition before the elections in February. Still, protesters like Diouf say they will not relent.

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Imran Khan is famous in Pakistan for his savvy use of social media. It was instrumental in shaping his political image in the early 2000s and in building the campaign that brought him to power in August 2018. Throughout his premiership, social media was a key tool for Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party. But today, with Khan at the center of a conflict between political and military powers in Pakistan, social media too has become a space of bitter contention.  

Earlier this month, Khan was arrested on corruption charges by the Pakistan Rangers, a paramilitary force, while he was at the Islamabad High Court for a hearing. His arrest, on May 9, triggered nationwide protests and violent clashes between his supporters and the police resulting in at least eight deaths and dozens of injuries. Khan’s supporters had launched an arguably unprecedented attack on the Pakistani army and its institutions. In the city of Lahore, supporters set a mansion belonging to a senior military officer on fire. Since its formation as an independent state in 1947, Pakistan has spent over three decades, at various times, under military rule. Even when civilian governments have been in charge, the military has loomed in the background. Open defiance of the military’s hold on Pakistan is exceedingly rare.

In his latest Twitter Space event, Khan urged his supporters, whom he described as his “social media heroes,” to continue to stay strong in the face of an ongoing crackdown against him and workers from his political party, thousands of whom have faced arrests, been detained or are on the run. Pakistan, Khan said, is being governed by the “law of the jungle.”

Technology has been central to Khan’s emergence as a leading politician. A decade after his PTI party formed in 1996, a group of tech-forward supporters built the party’s website — a first for any political party in Pakistan. At the time, PTI was derisively referred to as the “social media party,” and its leader was dubbed “Facebook Khan,” implying that the party lacked any real influence in a country dominated by the military and by warring political dynasties.

Strategic online campaigning, though, helped Khan’s PTI reach young people eager for change and for relief from the corrupt ruling elite. “Tabdeeli,” or change, trended on social media platforms across Pakistan. Inspired by Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, the PTI’s social media team were brimming with fresh, inventive ideas for how to leverage technology to market Khan. Soon, he was being referred to as Pakistan’s “Kaptaan,” Urdu for “captain,” a pointed reference to his glorious career as a cricket player.

By 2018, Khan’s social media machine was credited with delivering the party’s first victory in national elections. PTI’s digital politics marked a significant shift from the antiquated way in which Pakistan’s biggest parties conducted elections, from both the pre-poll targeting of voters to on-the-day mobilization of supporters.

It’s not only PTI that benefited from its strong online presence. The military strongly supported Khan. In fact, until Khan was removed from office in 2022, it was hard to distinguish between the online networks of the PTI and the Pakistani military. These digital warriors were easily distinguished by their use of the Pakistani flag to show their patriotism and by the manner in which they organized to promote positive news about Pakistan, highlight criticisms of India and counter Pakistanis they characterized as “traitors” because they dared to dissent from the state’s narrative.

Members of Imran Khan’s digital media team became participants in national security meetings with military advisers. Digital strategy was a key component of foreign policy discussions.

In a study published in August 2022, researchers found that the interests of PTI supporters and the Pakistani army converged. “Patterns of Twitter retweets and analysis of Facebook data provide important evidence,” the researchers wrote, “of a de facto coalition between the networks of the military and PTI.” Dissidents, they pointed out, “were largely drowned out by the mainstream political parties and military.”

Now, with the PTI in direct opposition to the Pakistani military, conflict between these institutions and their supporters is playing out actively online. When authorities blocked internet access amid protests earlier this month, it was an admission that it could not contain the outrage of PTI supporters.

After Khan’s arrest on May 9, the Pakistani government blocked access to broadband services and social media platforms for four days. Though the state regularly applies an internet kill switch to ostensibly quell unrest, this was the longest such shutdown in a country of 128 million internet users. The intent was to contain the outrage and perhaps to silence groups critical of the military’s role in Pakistani politics, which it entirely failed to do. 

While criticism of the military’s role in politics is not unprecedented, the scale of the recent wave of anti-military sentiment sparked by Khan’s arrest was extraordinary. And it was generated mostly through social media. After Khan was ousted from office last year, anti-army hashtags began to trend on social media platforms. The growing criticism and anger over the army’s role in removing Khan from office culminated in the violence earlier this month. The Pakistani civilian government, led by Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, has already declared that protestors who attacked military properties will be tried under army law — draconian legislation that is typically used to try enemies of the state.

The pressure on Khan’s supporters and particularly on members of his political party is taking its toll. In a high-profile departure, Khan’s former human rights minister Shireen Mazari quit the party on May 23. She had been arrested and then arrested again, even after she had been granted bail, an “ordeal,” she said, that “had an impact on my health.”

But silencing PTI is particularly challenging due to its global reach. Regardless of whether coverage of Khan’s public speeches and rallies are censored on mainstream media in Pakistan, PTI posts hourly updates and testimonials from PTI workers with English subtitles across social media platforms, often with the hashtag #ThisWasNotOnTV.

“The whole world is watching, politics is no longer restricted to streets,” said Jibran Ilyas, PTI’s social media lead and a cybersecurity expert based in Chicago. When mobile internet networks were down in Pakistan, Ilyas organized an online campaign to request that residents based in protest areas make their Wi-Fis public to help PTI members upload footage on social media and share updates with the rest of the team.

Though, according to Khan, 10,000 party workers and most of the PTI leadership are under arrest or on the run, PTI’s digital team is still online. Fearing imminent arrest and speaking from an undisclosed location, a PTI worker told me they didn’t sleep for several days after Khan was arrested. “One of our team members was shot in the leg during protests and underwent a six-hour surgery. Even then, they were still posting updates on social media,” said another member of the PTI social media team. On TikTok, in the four days between Khan’s arrest and bail hearing, the PTI’s official account reached over 100 million people and the team put out 164 videos, revealed a recent report.

With its digital support and global reach, can PTI’s online coalition be dismantled? “It is possible PTI can sustain its social media mobilization in the face of censorship, calibrated shutdowns and a general crackdown, which may intensify,” said Asfandyar Mir, an academic who published the 2022 paper noting the existence of  the “de facto coalition” between the army and PTI that led to Khan becoming prime minister. 

As for the military, the country is once again papered with pro-army posters. They have also been successful in coercing some PTI leaders to quit the party and pressuring supporters to issue forced apologies online. The Pakistan defense minister revealed that the government is considering banning the PTI because it has “attacked the very basis of the state.” And there is evidence that the state is shutting down internet services within a five-kilometer radius of Khan’s house in the city of Lahore to make it difficult for him to address his supporters online. “We are in uncharted territory for Pakistani politics and its intersection with digital mobilization,” Mir told me.

The future of Khan and his party is in the balance. But whether he, or his party, withstand the pressure, a key question remains unanswered: The people may be fearful of the state, but are they still respectful of its institutions?

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The conflict is rooted in ethnic and tribal tensions. But there is also an element of the religious division for which India, under the nearly decade-long leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has become increasingly known worldwide. In India’s last population census, administered in 2011, Christians made up over 41% of Manipur residents. About half of the state’s residents are Hindus. Groups of mostly Hindu Meitei people from the valley clashed on May 3 with Christian tribal groups who live in the hills around Manipur. The Christians were holding a demonstration in defense of their tribal status, which they believed the more privileged Meteis were trying to usurp for themselves.

During the riots, public property and people’s homes and vehicles were set on fire in arson attacks reported across the state. According to church groups, about 120 churches were set on fire or otherwise destroyed.  

The 2022 edition of the annual U.S. State Department report on religious freedom, released on May 15, noted that the Indian government is among those that “freely target faith community members within their borders.” The State Department quoted the spokesman of a Christian NGO who described the situation facing all minorities as “unprecedentedly grave.” The Indian authorities have dismissed the report as “based on misinformation and flawed understanding.”

But Rahul Gandhi, the leader of India’s opposition Congress party, said that “what is happening in Manipur is the result of the politics of hate.” He was speaking at a rally in the southern state of Karnataka just before state elections on May 10, 2023. “Manipur is on fire,” Gandhi said, “people are dying and the prime minister doesn’t seem to be concerned.” 

Modi has continued to remain silent throughout the weeks of violence in Manipur, even as the army has been deployed to quell unrest and an internet ban and curfew have been imposed. 

In Manipur, the largely Hindu Meitei people inhabit the valley area where Imphal, the capital city, is located. The mostly Christian tribes, like the Kukis and the Nagas, live in the hills. The people of the mainly Christian hill tribes say they can no longer live with the mainly Hindu Meitei people. 

Historically, Hindu Meiteis have dominated positions in politics and the state administration. Meitei is one of 22 official languages recognized by the Indian Constitution and the sole official language of Manipur. Two-thirds of the members of the Manipur state assembly, including the state’s chief minister, are Meitei. And the Bharatiya Janata Party, Modi’s party, which promotes an aggressively Hindu nationalist agenda, holds power  at both state and federal levels. The BJP government in Manipur, led by chief minister Biren Singh, has been accused of favoring the Hindu Meitei majority and enacting anti-tribal policies such as converting tribal land into protected state properties. According to Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty, the national affairs editor at the Indian news website The Wire, “the chief minister appears to be behaving like a spokesman of the majority Meitei community.” 

While the BJP government of Manipur has been accused of favoring the Meiteis over hill-dwelling tribals, the Meiteis have also been lobbying for tribal status. Last month, an order by the Manipur High Court gave the state government just four weeks to grant the Meiteis special tribal status. This status is necessary to access certain government-run affirmative action programs, including quotas for government jobs. Christian tribes, particularly the Kukis, have argued that the Meiteis already enjoy privileges in Manipur and that any extra privileges might hurt the tribes for whom affirmative action is necessary. 

The Meitei people have been demanding special tribal status because, they say, the hill tribes are able to buy land in the valley, while they are unable to buy land in the hills. The tribes, though, point to the greater wealth of the Meiteis, gained from living in the valley and in Imphal, Manipur’s capital. Were Meitei residents able to buy land in the hills, the tribes argue, the Kukis and the Nagas, among others, would find themselves priced out of their own lands.

In response to the court order, a tribal students’ union organized a “solidarity march” on May 3, which sparked violence, including an arson attack on a Kuki war memorial.

Hesang, a Kuki activist, told me that the memorial was an “important part of the community’s history.” He said that while the protest was peaceful, the burning down of the memorial was a “provocation that was seen as a challenge to Kuki history.” Manipur has barely been able to pause for breath since. 

On May 22, after relative calm appeared to have returned, army units had to quell violence that was reportedly directed at Meitei shopkeepers. Houses were set ablaze in the capital, Imphal, and the state was placed under curfew from 2 p.m. until 6 a.m., with the already existing ban on mobile internet services extended until May 26.

The violence in Manipur, despite all the deaths and damage, has received scant attention on India’s numerous mainstream cable news channels. But there has been plenty of debate about the situation in Manipur on social media. Inevitably, some of the online content has been misinformation, hate speech and conspiracy theories, which is why the Manipur government says it has banned mobile internet access. Despite the spread of fake news, a Meitei person who requested anonymity told me that “in a situation like this, when you are cut off from genuine sources of information, the imagination gives oxygen to rumors.” 

Some of these rumors have been spread by the BJP government itself. Though the recent violence began after protests against the High Court’s order to grant the Meitei people special tribal status, the government claimed it began because of its crackdown on illegal immigrants from Myanmar. These illegal immigrants, the government says, grow poppies in the hills to use in the drug trade.  

The people the BJP government refers to as “illegal immigrants” are actually refugees who fled Myanmar after the 2021 military coup. These refugees share the same ethnic background as the Kukis. Angshuman Choudhury, a fellow at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, told me that “there is a feeling amongst Kukis that their roots in Manipur are being questioned by both the state government and dominant civil society.” 

In March 2023, six Meitei student associations released a joint statement in which they accused “outsiders coming from the other side of Indian boundaries, especially Myanmar” of “encroaching on land which is owned by the state in the hills of Manipur.” These outsiders, the statement went on to conclude, represented a “never-ending threat to the indigenous people of Manipur.” A Metei activist, who wished to remain anonymous because they didn’t agree with some of the xenophobic rhetoric of the state government, told me that illegal immigration from Myanmar meant there had been an “unusual rise in the population of Kukis, and other communities in Manipur feel this is expansionism.” 

Kukis, the Meiteis say, fear that the BJP government will publish a National Register of Citizens in Manipur, just as it did in the bordering state of Assam in 2019. The much-criticized National Register is apparently intended to root out illegal residents from India. In Assam, though, it effectively stripped two million people of their citizenship, often on questionable grounds. 

Choudhury, of the Center for Policy Research, told me that in both Assam and Manipur,  BJP governments had introduced “a powerful regime of ethno-political protectionism based on a narrow and chauvinistic imagining of society.” He said there was a “subterranean attempt to reimagine and homogenize certain pluralistic ethnic identities, like Assamese and Meitei, as strictly Hindu.”

A member of the Indian Parliament from Manipur wrote to Modi, asking him to employ a “strong hand” to stop the threat of “Balkanization on ethnic lines” in Manipur. But it is arguably in the nature of BJP policies to exacerbate ethnic and religious divisions. Earlier this month, the writer Arundhati Roy told an audience at a literature festival in the southern state of Kerala that the BJP asking for votes was “like a lit match asking the firewood to ‘give us a chance.’”  

For three weeks, the BJP has been unable to douse the flames in Manipur. When will the prime minister take notice?

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It’s September 23, four days after the Iranian government shut down the internet in the northern Kurdish city of Sanandaj. Not long after Mahmoudi and I spoke, the Iranian government blocked access to Instagram and WhatsApp (estimated to be used by 70% of Iranian adults) and shut down the internet for hours each day so that even basic communication, let alone work, became almost impossible.

The internet disruptions followed several days of nationwide, anti-government protests in response to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while she was in the custody of Iran’s vicious and widely reviled morality police. 

At least 76 people have been killed during the protests, human rights groups say, and over 700 arrested. The police said Amini died of a heart attack. But her father insisted she was healthy. Photos that emerged after her death were gut-wrenching: her eyes were purple and swollen. She appeared to have been tortured.

Mahmoudi is the executive director of United For Iran, a non-profit focused on human rights advocacy within the country that has built an application called Gershad, which first came to prominence in 2016, enabling Iranian women to warn each other about morality police in the vicinity. 

At the time, United For Iran kept their involvement in building Gershad quiet, but they have been open about the value of cell phone apps and web resources in helping to drive progressive change. One example is Nahoft, an app that enables Android users to encrypt their messages before sending them. (Over 90% of mobile phone users in Iran use the Android operating system.) Gershad has been a pivotal tool in this recent round of protests. Its Twitter account — where the group reposts some of the app’s reports on the Morality Police — has exploded, weekly impressions growing from 1,900 to nearly 1.5 million.

The shutting down of Iran’s mobile internet, though, has made the app largely unusable. Limited internet access has drastically narrowed who can use the application, leaving many still-active protesters vulnerable, echoing a similar shutdown in 2019 when an order from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei demanded “Do whatever it takes to stop them.” In the two weeks that followed, close to 1,500 people were killed.

For protesters, a popular app like Gershad serves as a rallying cry, a way to keep spirits up and motivate people to come out onto the streets. This sudden freeze in activity has jeopardized that aspect of the app. “The silence leads to people thinking there's nothing else happening. So it kind of takes the wind out of the sails,” Mahmoudi says. “So people don't go out on the street as much and it kind of fizzles out. And then they kill us.”

When Gershad made its debut in 2016, it spread rapidly. “Within 12 hours, we had to get a new server,” Mahmoudi told me. The group had released the app with no advertising, yet it had a user base of 10,000 people within the first 48 hours. That kind of popularity quickly attracted the attention of the Iranian government, which banned Gershad and its APIs (application programming interface, the software that allows apps to talk to each other) within 24 hours of its release. 

The ban, intended to render the app useless to those who had downloaded it, was quickly circumvented by the development team — building functions into the interface that worked around the censorship. Even in the app’s infancy, its adversarial relationship with Iranian authorities seemed clear. The app was designed to help Iranian citizens retain some control, while the Iranian authorities appear determined to violently repress even the most minor displays of individual agency.

“I wouldn’t necessarily say the government is at the forefront of our minds,” Fereidoon Bashar, Executive Director of ASL19, a Canadian technology company focused on civil society and who heads Gershad’s software development, told me. “For us, it's mostly about how we can make the app more secure, more private, but that means the government is certainly an adversary.” 

Iran has a history of using technology to limit the freedom of its citizens. Early this month, Iranian officials announced that facial recognition technology would now be used to identify and fine women who weren’t adhering to the country’s rigid dress code.

Despite the adaptability and flexibility of the Gershad developers, the question for many Iranian developers is whether technology that is largely used to oppress Iranians can also be used to liberate them?

In 2018, for example, in response to Telegram’s growing popularity within the country, Iran banned the application and introduced Telegram Gold, which advertised new features and, most importantly, was actually available. The app became a user-data farm for the Iranian government, which quickly collected close to 14 million users’ private information. 

“If you don't have people familiar with the geopolitical situation on your team, then definitely your tools might be like a weapon in their hands,” said Amir Rashidi, director of digital rights at the Texas-based Miaan Group, which provides technical, legal, and research expertise to human rights organizations in Iran and the region.

Bashar, for much of our conversation, seemed barely able to bring himself to speak. Like Mahmoudi, he appeared exhausted and sad. “I’ve seen better days,” he admitted, as soon our call began. For him, his work on Gershad, despite its success and its value to the protests, was no substitute for not being there, for not being out on the streets and actively present.

“Maybe I don't think of it as guilt or maybe I should,” he sighed. “It's definitely a feeling that you're on the outside and there are people that are, you know, being violently brutalized and oppressed. It’s been hard to watch.”

“I don’t necessarily see the internet shutdown as something that concerns the app’s success,” he told me. “The consequences that follow internet shutdowns are faced by actual protesters and people.” 

Despite the shutting down of mobile internet services and the effect on daily life, Iranians have kept coming out onto the streets to make their anger heard. Reports emerging from Iran have suggested that the vans of the morality police — large white-and-green patrol vehicles from which officers kept their eyes on Iranian citizens, particularly women — have disappeared entirely.

Rashidi, who told me that the shutting down of the internet in Iran was his ”biggest fear,” acknowledged that the crowds of people willing to brave police brutality and prison had inspired hope in all those who imagine a less repressive future for Iran. “I mean, we had witnessed police brutality for a long time,” he said, “but this one was different. She was so innocent. There was nothing wrong with her dress and that basically fanned the flames of frustration. That’s why we're seeing all these protests around the country.”

Though experts continue to doubt that these protests will result in the overthrow of the Khamenei regime, the protesters have managed to change the debate. Previous protests had centered around the economy and electoral corruption; now culture and repression are the catalysts.

Mahmoudi told me she has a comment left for Gershad’s team saved on her computer. The message helps remind her that technology can still be a force for good: “Gershad is a successful example of channeling hatred and anger to underground tunnels without the need for leadership or the media. Every minute we are recreating the map of our city…together.” 

The message speaks to Gershad’s ultimate philosophy: it’s about the user base, it’s about collaboration and the lack of hierarchy or singular control, and it’s about access and agency.

“I really like that,” Mahmoudi said, smiling.

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Increasingly, many in Western countries are oblivious when this happens, compounding the isolation endured by people taken offline. Here are some internet blackouts you probably don’t know about:

1) In January, Kazakhstan made headlines because of its mass anti-government protests and the total internet blackout that followed. The Kazakh government has been in the habit of throttling the internet for a while though. For example, on May 9, 2019, the presidential election day, authorities cut off internet access coinciding with detentions of activists and journalists participating in the demonstrations at the time. In 2012, Kazakhstan's parliament amended a national security law allowing the government to shut down internet and mobile connections during riots or anti-terrorist operations.

2) In April 2019, London police shut down Wi-fi in London’s tube stations to halt the actions of Extinction Rebellion, an environmental activist group whose civil disobedience protests in the UK had caused disruptions on roads, bridges and railways and resulted in hundreds of protesters being detained. “In the interests of safety and to prevent and deter serious disruption to the London Underground network, British Transport Police has taken the decision to restrict passenger Wi-Fi connectivity at Tube stations,” a police spokesperson told The Verge in 2019.

3) One popular tool to combat exam cheating has become the shutting down of the internet. Algeria, Syria, Sudan, Jordan and India have been regularly cutting off the Internet during annual nationwide exams to prevent cheating and the leaking of test questions. Forcing large numbers of people into internet blackouts was not as productive as they wished, however, as questions still got leaked. Uzbekistan cut off internet and messaging services during several hours of exams as far back as early 2010s.

4) In 2020, India shut down the internet 109 times, according to a report by the digital rights organization Access Now. Indian authorities cut off internet access during protests, elections, and religious holidays, like for Eid-e-Milad-un-Nabi celebrations in Madhya Pradesh state in 2019. Internet cut-offs during religious holidays are not exclusive to India. In 2018, authorities in Bali asked mobile operators to cut off the internet during Nyepi, a Hindu celebration of the New Year, characterized by observing different prohibitions. Gadgets are getting in the way of introspection, Hinduism Society head Gusti Ngurah Sudiana told the BBC.

5) Over 18 months, residents of a village called Aberhosan in Wales would mysteriously lose their internet connection every morning because of the Good Morning Britain morning TV show, or rather a couple who loved watching it. In September, 2020, after months of exhaustive investigations, a dedicated group of engineers discovered Alun and Elaine Rees accidentally cut off the internet in the whole village when they switched off their old TV to watch the show by hijacking the village-wide network. After the revelation, the accidental culprits decided to not use their old TV again.

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With over 60,000 subscribers on Telegram and close to 20,000 on Instagram, Narikbi Maksut was used to a constant flurry of notifications. When his phone went silent, he knew something had gone wrong. 

“At first I thought they had just blocked the internet, but they had literally turned it off,” said Maksut, an IT specialist in the Netherlands. “That’s when I started to panic.”

Demonstrations over a hike in fuel prices in early January started to spread across Kazakhstan, where Maksut is from. He had been live streaming on Instagram with friends at the demonstrations, staying in touch with relatives and keeping close watch as events unraveled into some of the worst bloodshed in the country’s 30 years of independence.

Then Kazakhstan hit the kill switch. Over five straight days, the government shut down the internet. Although an unprecedented move by Kazakhstan authorities, the government is a dictatorship, and its monopolistic control over telecommunications is enshrined by law. While some regions across the huge country — the size of western Europe — were able to stay partially online, residents in the largest city, Almaty, were plunged into a total blackout: both wired and mobile internet turned off, and sometimes landline telephone service, too.

What Maksut and a group of his friends did next, however, is a valuable case study on how to survive an internet blackout — an increasingly go-to tactic for authoritarians worldwide. The success of these programmers to set up close to 40 proxy servers over a few days on a shoestring budget speaks to the dilemma facing old-school authoritarian regimes like Kazakhstan: a growing tech-savvy middle class with the know-how to overcome the digital tools of authoritarianism. Based on user traffic provided by Telegram, Maksut estimates the group got between 300,000 to 500,000 people online on the message app during the five-day shutdown.

Like Belarus, where censorship and shutdowns are also favored tools for squashing dissent, Kazakhstan has a flourishing IT sector with experts employed at leading global tech companies. Maksut, a programmer at Booking.com in Amsterdam, sent out a call on his Telegram channel when he saw Kazakhstan had gone offline. About 20 expat Kazakhs answered. They work at offices such as Meta in London, Amazon in Luxemburg, Google in Zurich, all trying to reach their family members in Kazakhstan.

Over the next few days, the loosely organized group set up dozens of proxy servers — first for Telegram and later even for internet browsers like Firefox. Maksut admits their user estimates aren't exact; not all of them had a chance to collect data. But more recently, on January 19, Zharaskhan Aman, a software engineer at Facebook in London, rounded up some of the numbers he had from Telegram analytics showing that the 9 servers he raised alone had 155,762 users from Kazakhstan between January 4 and 11. “I didn’t expect such a flow of people, some of them didn’t even know what a proxy was,” said Aman.

When they realized that there was a way through Kazakhstan’s internet blackout, they formed an ambitious plan. “I realized at that moment that we can scale this up,” Maksut said. “Scale it up to get an entire city, all of Almaty, back online on Telegram.”

To be sure, experts on internet connectivity and those monitoring internet blackouts say what the programmers accomplished is not scalable and is out of reach for the millions of low-tech, everyday internet users knocked offline during blackouts. Data from NetBlocks, a London-based global internet monitor, shows just how effective this particular blackout was, with internet traffic plummeting from 100% connectivity to 2% on January 5.

The graph below does show that traffic slowly rose over the next few days, with authorities restoring connections at select times before lifting the blackout on January 11.

“Of course you can’t say that they supplied all of Kazakhstan with a connection. For the ordinary user, it wasn’t just complicated, it was super complicated,” said Mikhail Klimarev, director of the Society for the Defense of the Internet. “I’m not saying anything against them, they are great guys and did things exactly the way they should: people have to do research like this. And if the shutdown had continued, it’s possible what they made would be in demand.”

Nevertheless, the frequency of global shutdowns is growing exponentially and Coda spoke to four of the programmers to understand how it worked.

A senior software engineer at LinkedIn in Toronto, Maksat Kadyrov jumped into action when he lost touch with his brother in Almaty. He went live on Instagram, looking to crowdsource a way to reach his family. Surprisingly, a few IT specialists in Kazakhstan were able to connect and report that four or five of their VPNs were still working inside the country. “If the internet is blocked, this shouldn’t be working,” Kadyrov remembers thinking. “This violates the entire logic of an internet blackout.”

Already in touch with Maksut, Kadyrov and a handful of other specialists realized this must mean there were cracks in the blackout that could be exploited, a backdoor still open to internet traffic. Said Kadyrov: “It was as if the internet hadn’t been turned off after all, but a curtain had been draped over, with a few bits of light still shining through.”

Kadyrov went hunting for any ports that were still working, rallying with others as he worked. Ports in computer networking act almost as mail sorting tubes, directing data to where it should go. He live streamed on Instagram for hours as they scanned some of the more than 65,000 existing ports. During the live stream, they found five open ports, tested them and were able to establish a connection. They later learned that it was a bug in outdated Cisco equipment, used widely by Kazakh telecom operators, which had accidentally kept these ports open. Kadyrov, Maksut and the others used these open ports to support their operation, crowdsourcing funds or footing the cloud computing bill themselves from service providers like Digital Ocean and Amazon.

Sharing connection instructions by Telegram, email and text, members of the group said they were overwhelmed with demand. Within 24 hours Kadyrov said he had more than 2,000 requests for access to his servers, which he had been sending out one-by-one. Maksut was also overwhelmed with requests for access: “They went like hotcakes.”

For those outside the country, the totality of the blackout was unnerving. Just as reports of chaos, gunfire and an unfolding terrorist attack broke in international headlines, messages stopped delivering. Calls simply didn’t go through. For the nearly 19 million people living in Kazakhstan, the chaos was far more immediate. Loudspeakers in city centers, leftover remnants of the Soviet past, were used to broadcast ominous messages for residents to stay indoors and away from windows, no further context given. Television stations and even radio broadcasts stuck to entertainment programming or were simply not working.

Over the following five days, internet connections were restored periodically, in some cases tied to certain government announcements. People were able to place calls again. The government’s official messaging has been that a mass terrorist attack, largely led by foreigners, was underway across the country. Authorities have presented scant evidence to back up their claims, while scores of activists and supporters of the protest have been detained, some reporting beating and torture in prisons.

In response to the government’s pronouncements, opinions within the VPN group had split on what to do next. Kadyrov shut down his VPNs. “My position was that it was important to stand with the government against these terrorists. Then I saw people were starting to use my VPNs for Torrent and for mining bitcoin. I said, ‘Thanks everyone, I’m out.’”

Others, like Maksut, kept their VPNs going, reasoning that if there really was a sophisticated terrorist attack underway, they weren’t waiting around to use his VPN connection to communicate, especially as periodic throttling during protests have been common practice for years in Kazakhstan. The priority was to keep people informed.

“People died because they didn’t have information or a connection,” said Aman, the engineer in London. In the following weeks dozens of stories emerged of life in an information void where many carried on unaware of the violence. A 12-year-old boy was reportedly killed by a stray bullet while walking to buy bread with his mother; a four-year-old girl was shot dead when her father drove into the city center with his three children, straight into a shootout.

“There is really no benefit to a shutdown,” said Natalia Krapiva, tech legal counsel at Access Now. “It doesn’t help governments maintain security, it doesn’t help them maintain order, it doesn’t help misinformation from spreading, it’s actually the opposite: shutdowns are usually associated with more violence. People are left with whatever pieces of rumors they can find.”

Supported by the Russian-Language News Exchange

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It was the latest digital shutdown to occur during the wave of unrest. On July 11 — fueled by electricity cuts, food and medicine shortages, and a spiraling economic crisis — thousands of Cubans took to the streets in the country’s largest protest movement in decades. Images and videos of the protests ricocheted across social media. Shortly thereafter, digital rights groups began reporting a series of internet outages, while authorities blocked access to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter for days on end.

The Cuban government, led by Raúl Castro’s successor, President Miguel Díaz Canal, quickly moved to clamp down on the unrest. Since protests broke out, the government has detained an estimated 700 people, according to human rights organizations, and relatives of those held report being left in the dark for extended periods of time about their family members’ whereabouts. “At any moment, they could show up at my door,” a Cuban independent journalist told the New York Times. “It’s a fear that’s with me from the moment I wake up.”

The country’s last major protest movement was in 1994. That was a previous internet era, a time before smartphones and social media. In 2018, after years of internet restrictions, Cuba began permitting 3G for mobile phones, and later legalized wireless networks in homes and businesses. Many believe the country’s expanded internet access has played a key role in the current protest moment.

From Russia to Africa, internet blackouts have become a go-to method of repression for authoritarian governments during elections and political unrest. 

Norges Rodríguez is the co-founder of YucaByte, a website about technology, activism, and culture in Cuba. He believes the internet has helped bring about a Cuban version of perestroika, the series of political and economic reforms launched by Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union during the 1980s, by allowing people to access a wider range of information than previously possible — including perspectives that challenge the government’s tight grip on power. 

We talked about how Cuba’s digital ecosystem has become a political battlefield as protests test the regime’s hold on the country. 

This conversation was edited for length and clarity and translated from Spanish.

Coda Story: The news out of Cuba is moving quickly. So let’s start with what’s happening. Can you bring us up to speed on what’s going on right now in Cuba and the state of internet access?

Norges Rodríguez: Right now there are no protests. What there is is a lot of repression. After the protests, which lasted 3 days more or less, there was a campaign of repression. There are people who are missing, their families don’t know anything about them, people who are detained and some who have been let out, mainly because of international pressure. But there are no protests.

The [authorities’] response to these incidents is not disinformation, but brute force. And brute force is turning off the internet and social networks.

The thing is this is an analog government confronting a digital reality. For TV and radio they had and have a monopoly. They said something and this was the truth. But this reality changed because for many people, social media is something else. What you say on the radio and TV, after, people do fact-checking of what you said. This has harmed them.

I want to talk a little bit more about the significance of the internet and social media in this moment. Do you think that this could have happened without social media?

No. In December 2018, Cuba connected to the internet for the first time from mobile phones. Before this, they didn’t have internet 24 hours a day. This began to generate what we called the ‘infoactivism’ of Cubans. From then on, people started to organize themselves, using groups on Telegram. Not just to protest, but to help each other. 

In January 2019, there was a tornado in Havana and people organized themselves to help people who had been harmed. In May 2019, the LGBT community marched in Havana and protested. They organized on WhatsApp, Telegram. It wasn’t that big. But it ended with repression and a lot of people were detained. After this it could be a kind of timeline of everything that has happened in Cuba, that is related to the access to the internet and social media. 

I think that the internet has been the perestroika of Cuba. You can go to the internet to get information but also you can transmit, upload videos and tell a story. You can access information you didn’t know, and then you can convert it into media. It can be a video transmitted on facebook that can get a million views. 

In some ways, what you're describing kind of seems like an older moment in the history of the internet. For example, during the Arab Spring, I remember hearing people talk excitedly about how it represented the promise of the internet and the digital sphere. But now, in the U.S., at least, it often feels like we are in a digital moment that feels much harsher. 

I totally understand what you mean. In the context of countries that have democracy, human rights, it has been negative, but because social media it’s like a country inside the country, or a state inside the state. There is no precedent, because laws don’t go at the same speed as technology. But in the context of Cuba specifically, I think it has been positive. I worry about countries where there was this spring but in the end there wasn’t a more democratic change. Power adapted and started to use social media as a mechanism of control.

Do you think that could happen in Cuba?

It worries me. I think this scenario could happen. But on the other side, I note that within the government, I feel that they don’t have the skills to carry this out. I think there’s a generational element. There are very few young people committed to the regime. Those leading the country are almost all over 80, 90 years old. On a social level, there’s a disconnection between the people who are tech savvy, who are almost all young people, and those who dominate the country, the physical space. And I think this could be negative for them, for their objective to stay in power.

Do you have any predictions or thoughts about what may happen next. Do you think people can expect to see more blackouts? 

Well, if there are protests, there’s obviously going to be more blackouts. And I think you are going to see protests. Because the things that brought people to protest were things like food -- there’s not a lot of food in the country -- electricity blackouts -- continue. The pandemic hasn’t been resolved. 

People asked for liberty and an end to the dictatorship. And there’s no liberty, the dictatorship continues. So there are all of the elements there for people to protest. And if people go out to protest, obviously [the government is] going to turn off the internet.

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Videos posted to social media by protesters on Sunday have shown hundreds of people marching through Havana and elsewhere in anti-government demonstrations sparked by a worsening economic crisis. Food and medicine shortages, rising prices and Covid restrictions have seen ordinary Cubans unable to work in the island nation’s tourism industry and led to lengthy queues for basic food items. 

One video uploaded to Twitter showed protesters overturning a police car in Cardenas, 90 miles from Havana. 

Recently, shutting down the internet has become the repressive tool of choice for authoritarian governments. In countries throughout Africa, popular elections have occasioned nationwide internet closures. Russia has broadly cracked down on internet freedoms in tandem with attacks on the media. And since the internet was introduced in the country, the Chinese government has used its vast powers to control its digital spaces and censure online speech.

The three or four internet outages began at around 4pm local time on Sunday, according to Marianne Díaz Hernández, a Chile-based Fellow at the digital rights group, Access Now. “This means that there are some places where there is no internet. It is too early for us to know precisely which places are affected but we do know that Havana and places where the protests were more significant yesterday were most affected.”

The rollout of digital connectivity across Cuba has been painfully slow since President Miguel Díaz-Canel took office in 2018. Díaz-Canel, the first Communist Party leader to hold the post outside of the Castro family, looked to increase access to the internet for ordinary Cubans. Since 2018, all Cubans have had access to mobile and Wi-Fi internet services via the state-owned telecommunication company ETECSA.  

The state tightly monitors Cuba’s digital spaces — the island has one of the lowest internet connectivity rates in the Western Hemisphere and connections are poor. The internet is also heavily censored and sites are blocked by the government. Freedom House, an organization that ranks political and digital freedoms around the world, gave Cuba a 22 out of 100 in its 2020 “Freedom on the Net” report. 

Díaz Hernández said the Cuban government’s grip on the internet mirrors other aspects of the Communist Party’s control throughout the country. “We need to remember that this is a small part of a larger structure of control,” she said. “That it is not just that the internet is controlled by the government, it's that everything is controlled by the government. Cubans cannot have independent businesses, they cannot make many decisions by themselves.” 

Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Kentik Technologies, a San Francisco-based provider of digital network solutions and intelligence, said he first saw declines in internet traffic on Sunday afternoon. He tweeted a graph showing a reduction in internet traffic in and out of Cuba. He said he initially wasn’t sure whether to ascribe the outages to technical difficulties being experienced by the Cuban government. 

“I don’t know if they are having technical problems or if they are trying to shut down portions of the country,” said Madory, who first began tracking internet availability in Cuba in 2013. “This year there have been a number of outages, nothing quite like this. All these shutdowns are new to Cuba. In Cuba, the internet has long been inaccessible, not a lot of people have had access to it, it’s censored.”

In a televised speech on Sunday afternoon, Diaz-Canel, who heads the Communist Party, blamed the unrest on the United States, which in recent years tightened its nearly 60-year-old trade embargo on Cuba. Diaz-Canel said that the protests were a form of “systemic provocation” by dissidents working with the U.S.

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The root of the digital disruption was a deadly raid at the home of a candidate running against President Idriss Déby Itno, who has been in power since 1990. After the attack in February, in which the candidate’s mother and several relatives reportedly died, the country’s internet and messaging services abruptly cut out. 

Bachar Bong said the shutdown lasted three days. During that time, he was unable to get online for work or communicate with family. In desperation, some people traveled to the border of Chad and Cameroon to try to gain access to Cameroon’s digital infrastructure, Bachar Bong said. He likened the sensation of living in digital darkness to losing one’s eyesight. “You can see nothing because you have no communication,” he said. “It was very difficult. We cannot live without internet as we cannot live without water today.”

In a few days, however, Bachar Bong worries Chadians could find themselves in online darkness once again. He and other digital rights campaigners are nervously eyeing upcoming presidential elections in Chad and Benin on April 11. The two countries both have histories of internet disruptions, in a region where blackouts are becoming a common tool for governments to suppress dissent and the free flow of information during elections, protests and periods of political unrest. 

Experts state that the stoppages have wide-ranging political, economic and social implications. “An internet shutdown results in a complete disruption of people's lives,” said Felicia Anthonio, a Ghana-based campaigner for the digital rights group Access Now. “We are in the middle of a pandemic and, as much as possible, we are trying to avoid physical spaces in order to stay safe. And just imagine without the internet, how is that going to be possible?” 

Benin and Chad are among a growing list of African countries that have cut off digital access during elections and periods of political instability in recent years. In 2021 alone, elections prompted government-imposed internet shutdowns in Uganda and the Republic of the Congo. The previous year, authorities blocked internet and social media access during polls in Tanzania, Togo, Guinea and Burundi. 

Last month, Coda Story reported on concerns about digital blackouts ahead of a presidential election in the Republic of the Congo, where President Sassou-Nguesso has been in power for decades. 

In an open letter on April 7, dozens of African and international human rights groups called on the presidents of Benin and Chad to keep digital networks working during the upcoming elections. “Both nations have a history of disrupting internet access during important national events,” they wrote. “Internet shutdowns cut off access to vital, timely, and life-saving information, as well as to emergency services, plunging whole communities into fear and confusion.”

Benin began to use digital blackouts during parliamentary elections in 2019. In Chad — where corruption is endemic, and political opponents face persecution and harassment — online disruptions first occurred in 2016, while presidential elections were being held. Two years later, amid anti-government protests, authorities cut off access to Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp and Facebook for 16 months, citing security concerns.

Internet and messaging service shutdowns can have consequences ranging from psychological to material. A March 2021 report by Tomiwa Ilori, a researcher at the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria, for the Global Network Initiative, an international NGO focused on internet freedom and privacy, analyzed network disruptions across 11 African countries, including Egypt, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), over the past decade. 

The report stated that most of the blackouts were government-ordered and affected peoples’ ability to take part in and monitor elections, organize political events and access public health information, including resources about Covid-19. They also adversely affected the incomes of individuals whose jobs rely on the internet and made it harder to receive remittances from family members living abroad.

“The general feeling that I get from speaking with respondents is that there is a feeling of despair and that feeling of despair usually lasts as long as internet shutdowns last,” Ilori told me “Despair as a result of panic, despair as a result of loss of income, despair as a result of loss of human dignity.”

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Ngombet, an outspoken Congolese human rights advocate who lives abroad, was monitoring the situation from his home base in France, checking in regularly with democracy activists on the ground. Then, suddenly, his contacts’ internet and mobile connections went dead and their communication came to a halt. He knew their tenuous virtual connection had flickered out.

After the digital blackout, Ngombet held his breath for updates — to make sure “everyone was ok, not arrested, or, worse, killed.” When he finally heard back from everyone, he felt a rush of relief. “It was a blur,” he recalls of their time in the digital dark.

Five years later, Ngombet has similar concerns about the vulnerability of the country's internet and mobile networks as it heads into another presidential election. Non-military voters will cast their ballots on March 21, and digital rights groups and election monitors are bracing for the possibility of an imminent internet shutdown. 

“Once a government shuts down the internet during such important national events, there is always a fear among the people that it would happen again,” says Felicia Anthonio, a Ghana-based campaigner for the digital rights group Access Now. “We reached out to a number of partners in and outside Congo to get an understanding of their expectations. And most of them seem to doubt that the government would keep the internet on.”

On March 16, dozens of organizations, including digital rights groups and press freedom advocates, publicly called on President Denis Sassou-Nguesso to keep the internet, social media platforms, and other digital communication channels up and running during the election period. “Nations across Africa, and the world, are intentionally shutting down the internet when people need it the most — during elections and important national events,” they wrote.

Congo’s 2015 digital disruption came in the wake of protests over a referendum that would allow President Sassou-Nguesso, who has been in power since 1997, to run for a third consecutive term. While the referendum passed, in the days leading up to the vote, police opened fire on demonstrators in violent protests, killing four. Internet and text messages in Brazzaville, the country’s capital city, crashed — an outcome the government attributed to a surge in demand for services. 

The digital shutdown set a precedent for presidential elections the following year when government officials shut down internet access, text messaging, and phone services for 48 hours over supposed national security concerns. 

Experts say governments often unleash internet blackouts under the auspices of preserving national security or public order. “No matter the justifications that these governments normally give, one thing that stands out is the fact that the impact is always devastating, and it further endangers peoples’ lives,” says Anthonio. 

The Republic of the Congo’s vulnerability to digital disruption comes as governments worldwide have used internet and social media outages to suppress dissent and communication during elections and civic unrest. Coda Story has previously reported on similar crackdowns in India, Myanmar, and Ethiopia.  

In 2020, Access Now documented 155 instances of internet shutdowns across 29 countries, with more than 100 in India alone. 

This trend has continued well into 2021. In Niger, the internet went out for ten days amid protests over the country’s February presidential election. The Ugandan government cut the country off from the internet on the eve of the January presidential election. 

Meanwhile, the upcoming April election in Chad — where the internet was shut down for months after the 2016 election – has digital rights groups on high alert.

Sub-Saharan Africa has emerged as a hotspot for government-imposed internet interference in recent years. Isabel Linzer, a research analyst at Freedom House, an organization that ranks political freedoms around the world, thinks that an increase in connectivity could be a factor in internet blackouts. “There are more and more people coming online, and so digital tools are playing a more significant role in political and social life,” she says. 

Repressive governments have taken note, added Linzer. “Many then turn to shutdowns, because shutdowns are really a very blunt instrument for controlling the flow of information.”

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For digital startups, the interruptions to the internet and phone networks have led to constant turmoil. According to Shady Ramadan, who founded the online food delivery service Yangon Door2Door in 2013, orders fell by 80% in the days after the February 1 coup. “I’m really worried for my business,” said Ramadan, 44, during a recent telephone conversation. “Right now, I feel like we are turning backwards and I fear there is no one to talk to.”

Ramadan’s company employs 300 bicycle couriers, who deliver over 2,000 orders a day in Myanmar’s largest cities of Yangon, Mandalay and Bagan. Before the internet shutdown, the riders worked in eight hour shifts until midnight and Ramadan was planning to expand to a 24-hour service. A curfew enforced by the military now means that last orders must be processed by 6pm.

While orders to Yangon Door2Door have recovered to around 1,000 a day, the decline in business has cut the couriers’ monthly incomes by 50%. Ramadan said he was considering both cuts to wages and lay-offs. Riders who once earned around $300 a month, including commission and tips, have seen their pay drop to $150.

Unlike companies such as Deliveroo and Uber Eats, whose couriers are broadly classified as self-employed, Yangon Door2Door employs around 450 staff. “Our messengers are full-time employees,” said Ramadan, who was born in Egypt and moved to Myanmar in 2010. “This is different from other food delivery companies around the world.”

The Myanmar coup took most of the international community by surprise. Only three months after the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) won the country’s general election, the army seized power and declared a year-long state of emergency. Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi and senior members of the NLD were placed under house arrest, and power now rests with military chief Min Aung Hlaing.

The armed forces moved quickly to gain control of the country’s institutions. Both internet and mobile data services were suspended and have since experienced sustained interruptions. Last week, Netblocks, a UK-based organization that monitors digital rights around the world, said the online encyclopedia Wikipedia had also been blocked in Myanmar. 

The military alleges that widespread election fraud was to blame for the defeat of the army-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party. Near daily protests peaked on Monday with millions taking to the streets across the country in mass strikes. The demonstrations are now being referred to as the “Five 2s” uprising, named for the date they began: 22/02/2021.

President Joe Biden has issued an executive order imposing financial sanctions against 10 individuals linked to the coup and steps are being taken to block military access to $1 billion of Myanmar government funds held in the U.S. Earlier this week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken posted a tweet in support of protesters in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma.

“The United States will continue to take firm action against those who perpetrate violence against the people of Burma as they demand the restoration of their democratically elected government,” it read. “We stand with the people of Burma.”

On the day of the coup, cuts to the internet and mobile data meant that customers could no longer access Yangon Door2Door’s app or website. “We are an online business, everything for us is based on the internet,” said Ramadan. “Our guys out in the street are based on the internet. If there’s no internet, we’re down.”

The staff worked up a solution by reverting to how restaurants once delivered food in the years before online connectivity. Workers sent text messages to regular customers and asked them to call to place orders.

Ramadan says the internet shutdowns have affected his company’s growth. He adds he will soon have to halt deliveries in Bagan and lay off workers. He also believes the outages are harming Myanmar’s small but vibrant e-commerce economy, valued at about $6 million in 2019.

“People sell things on Facebook, it’s a huge market here,” said Ramadan. “Whether it is food, or whether they import things from Singapore and sell them. They buy from Amazon and bring stuff to Myanmar. There are thousands and thousands of online businesses. All of them now have been switched off. Even if these businesses are two to three people, they are supporting families and there’s a trickle-down effect.”

Targeting the internet

The military junta’s crackdown on the internet and mobile data services has intensified since February 1. A cyber security bill released on February 11 proposes granting the regime a wide range of new powers, including requiring online service providers in Myanmar to locally store user data for three years. While the law doesn’t specify what kinds of companies might be affected, individuals convicted of failing to manage data in line with the cyber security bill could be jailed for up to three years, fined up to $7,500, or both.

The draft bill also gives the new government access to users’ personal data for security purposes and allows the authorities to force platforms to remove online content that threaten Myanmar’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity.” According to more than 150 local civil society groups, the 36-page document could pave the way for serious privacy and human rights abuses.

The military appears to be making calculated decisions about when ordinary citizens can access the internet. A nighttime curfew has been backed up by new daily internet blackouts. Recent data from Netblocks shows that the internet in Myanmar has been operating at around 13% of ordinary levels between 1am and 9am.

Yet those taking part in the country’s ongoing civil disobedience continue to livestream protests and strikes, with campaigners saying that the military’s control of the internet has been chaotic.

“We saw at the beginning they were chasing after social media platforms, shutting down Facebook, shutting down Twitter,” said Mark Farmaner, director of Burma Campaign UK. “Then they were shutting down the whole internet for two days, then starting it back up again, and then the overnight shutdowns. It seems like they are scrambling and don’t know exactly what to do and how to cope with the situation.”

Even though the military seems unwilling or unprepared to build a permanent wall around Myanmar’s internet, the disruptions have served to underscore the sometimes fragile link between emerging democracies and the freedoms widely believed to be enshrined in the world wide web. Long before this month’s army takeover, Myanmar was an important test bed for the use of new technologies in the decades-long struggle between the country’s military and its opposition groups.

Myanmar was an early example of how activists could harness the internet for positive change, when Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy won a sweeping victory in 1990’s first multiparty election in three decades. The military junta refused to recognize the results or hand over power. Suu Kyi was also placed under house arrest and the army banned her and other senior pro-democracy figures from taking part in elections.

Suu Kyi’s arrest galvanized global internet users who mobilized against the military. Digital mailing lists like BurmaNet, launched in 1993, shed light on the country’s worsening human rights situation by sharing news reports about Myanmar. BurmaNet proved to be so popular that in 1997, the military regime initiated its own rival electronic mailing list, called MyanmarNet.

Local and international activists, students and pro-democracy organizers from around the world also led online and offline efforts to limit the army’s income by campaigning against Western companies with business links in Myanmar. Activists with the popular Free Burma campaign used the internet to share audio and video files of human rights abuses, along with speeches by Suu Kyi.

As international pressure mounted, companies like Disney, PepsiCo Inc and Pizza Hut all terminated their business operations in Myanmar. In 1997, U.S. President Bill Clinton signed federal legislation banning any new investment by American companies in Myanmar.

Over the past decade, Myanmar has also seen the mass adoption of cellular services by ordinary citizens. A surge in network providers and affordable data plans has given residents access to some of the fastest mobile networks in the region. 

“The population of Myanmar has access to more information now than at any time in the past,” said Dr. Lee Jones, a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, who has written extensively about Myanmar’s politics and economy.

Jones said the daily internet blackouts have been used to cover up the nighttime arrests of hundreds of opposition politicians, civil servants and activists by police “snatch teams” in cities like Yangon. Recent video footage has shown residents banging pots and pans to warn their neighbors of approaching security forces.

“The control of the internet is a temporary tactical device,” said Jones. “The temporary outages are linked to providing cover for military operations in particular urban areas, which is why there isn’t a kind of actual shutdown, it keeps coming on and off.”

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“I had received a lot of calls in the early morning, but when I woke up, I tried to call them back and I couldn’t,” said Yi, an advocacy coordinator at the Action Committee for Democracy Development, a coalition of community-based rights groups. “I checked and there was no service at all, it had been cut off.”

Yi soon understood that Myanmar’s powerful military had taken control of the country overnight. “I was worried about friends, colleagues, leaders, politicians and activists,” she said. “Anything can happen at that time.”

On February 1, three months after Myanmar’s ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) won the country’s general election, the army seized power in a bloodless coup and declared a year-long state of emergency. Myanmar’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi and prominent members of the NLD were placed under house arrest. Power now rests with military chief Min Aung Hlaing.

The military alleges that widespread fraud took place in the November election, at the cost of the army-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party, and has taken control of major cities and introduced a curfew.

A crackdown on the internet and mobile networks was central to the coup. Internet access fell by 50% on Monday, according to NetBlocks, a UK-based organization that monitors digital rights around the world. In a tweet, it said that the “pattern of disruption indicates a centrally issued telecoms blackout order.”

NetBlocks also revealed that users were unable to access at least two cellular networks. Myanmar is home to four main providers, the Myanmar-backed MPT, a Qatari company named Ooredoo and Norway’s Telenor. All three are rivals of the military-backed telecommunications company MyTel.

Rights groups have previously raised concerns about the potential security threats posed to MyTel users. In 2018, the European Union considered applying sanctions against it, in response to human rights abuses by the military that left thousands of Rohingya Muslims dead and drove more than 700,000 to flee to neighboring Bangladesh.

On the day of the coup, the activist group Justice for Myanmar posted on Twitter warning of potential surveillance by MyTel: “On Mytel + the other mobile networks, the military can monitor voice calls, SMS, location and some online activity. We appeal to activists, human rights defenders and journalists to take extra care of their safety in this dangerous and uncertain time by taking these steps.”

The group called for human rights workers and journalists to adopt a number of measures to protect themselves from surveillance, including boycotting MyTel, using end-to-end encrypted apps like Signal, and avoiding voice calls and the sending of SMS messages on all networks. 

While it is uncommon for a nation’s armed forces to invest in mobile and internet infrastructure, as is the case in Myanmar, military control of digital spaces can yield huge power over citizens.

“The communication disruptions are an attempt by the Myanmar military to pull a blind over its heinous actions, including arbitrary detention of prominent critics of the military, wrote a spokesperson for Justice for Myanmar in an email. “This has instilled fear among the public and disrupted the daily lives of many who rely on the networks to conduct their work, which for some has been crucial during the time of pandemic.”

The internet has provided authoritarian leaders and democratic governments with a valuable off-switch to control populations during times of crisis. Online blackouts, disruptions to connectivity and social media outages have been a hallmark of elections and protests in 35 countries since 2019, including Iran, Uganda and Ethiopia. Coda Story has previously reported on blackouts in India and the introduction of new laws limiting digital freedoms in Russia.

While cellular network and internet access has mostly returned to Myanmar, digital rights activists are concerned about future consequences for free speech as the military consolidates its control of the country’s institutions. On Wednesday morning, users on two Facebook groups, Myanmar Civil Disobedience Movement Funds and Yangon Youth Network, were calling for doctors, teachers and other professions to halt work in protest against the coup. 

“From a freedom perspective, I believe there will be more control of internet traffic,” said an employee of Internet in Myanmar, a technology news website, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Since the last few months, the government started to introduce some filtering, I think we should expect that will happen more and more.” 

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On Monday the Ministry of Digital Development, Innovation and Aerospace Industry announced a drive to combat cyber attacks within the country, titled Cyber ​​Security Nur Sultan-2020. According to official statistics, attempted online breaches have almost tripled over the past year, owing to the shift to remote work caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

“During the period of cyber training, various problems may arise with access to some foreign internet resources, which can be eliminated by installing a security certificate,” read a statement by the ministry.

Most major websites use security certificates to prove their authenticity and create secure connections to a server when accessed through a browser. These certificates are generally approved by trusted authorities and protect users against what are known as man-in-the-middle cyber attacks.

In Kazakhstan’s case, the certificate authority becomes the state itself, meaning that the government controls what stands between an internet user and the services they can access. After installation, the certificate is also capable of redirecting users to other websites or reading information exchanged between them and the sites they are visiting.

Why it matters: “The human rights risk here is that you are allowing the government — in this case, to be candid, an authoritarian repressive government, eager to stifle dissent — to have access to the things you do on websites, which you often use to relay sensitive information,” said Noah Buyon, a Freedom House research associate specializing in digital rights in Eurasia. 

Arshyn Taizhanov, a web developer and co-founder of the group Internet Freedom Kazakhstan, added that many in the country oppose the certificate. Some also believe that it has been introduced before parliamentary elections, scheduled for January 10, to increase control over internet usage and place pressure on opposition activists. 

Buyon said that he considered the move to be a “power play” designed to send the message that “the government has the capability to interfere with people’s right to access independent information.”

The authorities deny that there is any risk. “The mechanism for applying the security certificate is not related to interfering in the private lives and correspondence of citizens, which is strictly regulated by the Constitution of the Republic of Kazakhstan," Talgat Mustagulov, deputy chairman of the ministry's Information Security Committee, told me in an email.

The bigger picture: It’s not the first time Kazakh authorities have tried something like this. The ministry launched a similar security certificate last summer, but major tech companies that produce browsers, including Google, Apple and Mozilla, blocked it. Shortly after, the certificate was retracted.

Kazakhstan scores 32 out of 100 and is classified as “not free” in Freedom House’s 2020 Freedom on the Net report. Buyon says the situation has worsened since large-scale anti-government protests last summer, which were met with internet shutdowns and the prosecution of activists under extremism charges. 

“The rollout of the national security certificate is part of this counter reaction,” Buyon said. “I think it’s going to be critical to look out for the reaction of tech companies here, because they really were the heroes of last summer’s saga. And they do have a power, in this sort of narrow line of attack that the government is launching, to make a positive difference.” 

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A recently exposed disinformation campaign on Facebook has highlighted the powerful role played by military-backed telecommunications companies in controlling digital spaces in one of the most authoritarian corners of the world.

As part of the social media platform’s much-publicized crackdown on fake news, the company earlier this year began to publish monthly reports about accounts, pages and groups designed to misinform and mislead users. 

A recently released document revealed a coordinated campaign targeting hundreds of thousands of people in Myanmar geared toward improving public opinion toward MyTel, the telecommunications company backed by Myanmar’s military.

The social media company found that a number of accounts, originating in both Myanmar and Vietnam, had posted material critical of three companies: the Myanmar-backed MPT; a Qatari company named Ooredoo; and the Norwegian Telenor. All are rivals of Myanmar’s military-backed telecommunications company MyTel. In total, the network of pages had gathered some 265,000 followers and spent more than $1.1 million on Facebook advertising.

According to the report, the administrators and owners of the accounts, which purported to be independent consumer news pages, operated financially-motivated influence operations that shared content about the alleged business failures of MyTel’s rivals. The posts were written in English and Burmese. 

MyTel is a joint venture between three major groups, including Myanmar’s military and VietTel, which is owned by the Vietnamese Ministry of Defense. In its investigation into disinformation in Myanmar, Facebook also discovered that although the organizations behind the campaign had attempted to conceal their involvement, a trail tied the network of Facebook pages to MyTel, VietTel and a Vietnam-based PR firm named Gapit Communications.

MyTel and Gapit did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

While telecommunications companies owned by governments can be found in countries around the world — Etisalat in the United Arab Emirates and the Data and Communication Company in Iran, for example —  those backed by armed forces are rare. However, where they do exist,  experts say that such companies wield huge power over digital spaces and competitors.

“Telecoms are very lucrative, and in some countries, like Myanmar, Vietnam and Egypt, the military really plays an outsized role in their economy and the country at large,” said Allie Funk, a researcher with Freedom House, an organization that ranks political liberty around the world. 

“Control over ISPs and other types of mobile services means that it is easier to access data that’s really sensitive to minority groups. It’s also then easier for the government to shut down the internet or block websites,” she added. 

Freedom House gave Myanmar an Internet Freedom Score of 36/100 in its 2020 country report. 

The network of fake accounts also highlights the penetration of social media platforms like Facebook in impoverished countries like Myanmar, where the company has more than 18 million users and is, for many people, the most popular way to access and share news.

The importance of telecoms to the military can be seen in a 2015 announcement by the Egyptian ministry of defense, which said it would create a National Company for Communications Infrastructure and own a 51% controlling stake in the new entity, overseeing the laying out and monitoring of fiber-optic cables nationwide. The plan never came to fruition. 

Danny O'Brien, director of strategy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a U.S. based nonprofit organization that defends civil liberties in the digital world, said Myanmar and Egypt share common forms of military oversight. 

“I think Myanmar and Egypt stand out because of a recent history, where military dictatorships were threatened by internet-mediated revolutions, and then managed to secure some degree of control,” he said, via email. “I think they learned a lesson then about the dangers a free and open internet can pose to military control.”

Myanmar’s restive Rakhine State is now home to the world’s longest-running internet shutdown. In June 2019, amid mounting clashes between the armed forces and insurgents from the predominantly Muslim Rohingya ethnic group, the Myanmar government ordered telecommunications networks operating in much of the state to switch off mobile internet access.

Facebook and Myanmar’s military

The discovery of the fake Facebook pages underscores concerns about how military-backed telecommunications companies seek to preserve their market share and raises questions as to whether Facebook should be doing any business at all with companies linked to Myanmar’s military, also known as the Tatmadaw. 

Mark Farmaner of Burma Campaign UK, a human rights advocacy group that publishes a “Dirty List” of businesses with ties to the Myanmar military, said Facebook’s move to curb coordinated disinformation about telecoms is insufficient.

“Facebook are happy for the Myanmar military to promote products that help pay for genocide, but if they spread disinformation about their rivals, that’s where Facebook draws the line. It’s a strange standard,” wrote Farmaner in email.

In 2018, Facebook removed the accounts of several Myanmar military officials from both Facebook and Instagram,  in order to prevent the spread of “hate and misinformation” related to the Rohingya.

In September 2018, the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on Myanmar, which is tasked with investigating human rights violations in the country, stated that the nation’s military has “so seriously violated international law that any engagement in any form with the Tatmadaw, its current leadership, and its businesses, is indefensible.” 

The UN’s findings followed a 2017 crackdown by the Myanmar military that left thousands of Rohingya dead and drove more than 700,000 to flee to neighboring Bangladesh.

Photo by SAI AUNG MAIN/AFP via Getty Images

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Ethiopia’s government blocked internet access across the country on June 30. The move followed a wave of deadly protests, sparked by the killing of the popular singer Haacaaluu Hundeessaa, whose music focused on the rights of the nation’s Oromo people. 

The ongoing shutdown, which applies to cellular and home networks, has been widely condemned by humanitarian groups as a “tool to muzzle activism” within the nation. But it is also denying a voice to citizens facing intolerable hardships abroad.

“If we held the protest while the internet was down, the Ethiopian government would not see it, so it would really be pointless,” said Banchi Yimer, the founder of the domestic workers rights organization Egna Legna Besidet. 

In Lebanon, some 250,000 domestic workers — the majority of whom are women from Ethiopia — are registered under kafala. As such, their legal status and residency is tied to their employers, meaning that they cannot leave or change jobs at will. Workers are also excluded from protections provided by national labor laws. 

Domestic staff are often forced to work long hours without breaks, and denied rest days and holidays. Their passports are frequently confiscated by employers and racial abuse is widely reported. In a number of cases, women have been beaten, starved and sexually assaulted.

According to statistics released by Lebanon’s General Security agency in 2017, an average of two domestic workers die in the country each week, often as a result of attempted escapes or suicide.

“Kafala is slavery, it’s as simple as that,” said Hareg, who declined to give her full name. Originally from Ethiopia, she has worked in Lebanon as a maid for nine years. 

Lebanon’s economic crisis, which had been deepening for months, has been sent into overdrive by the global Covid-19 outbreak. The national currency has plummeted to less than a quarter of its official pegged value against the U.S. dollar, and the cost of basic goods has rocketed. Domestic workers have become an unaffordable luxury, and thousands have had their salaries slashed, gone unpaid or lost their jobs entirely. 

Since early June, dozens of Ethiopian women, abandoned by employers, have been forced to sleep on the sidewalk in front of their national consulate. Many were left without money, belongings or passports. 

“Every hour, another taxi would pull up and dump a woman on the street,” said Hareg, who has been visiting to help new arrivals. 

The Ethiopian consulate was, at first, slow to act. Recently, it set up a shelter for some of these women. Others are living in cramped, shared housing, or in refuges run by the Catholic relief organization Caritas Internationalis.  

Another Canada-based activist organization, founded by former migrant workers, is doing what it can to help. This Is Lebanon was established in 2017, to draw attention to the plight of foreign domestic workers within the country. Part of its strategy is the naming and shaming of abusive employers by posting their photographs and personal details on a dedicated Facebook page.  

The group relies on high public visibility and a large social media following, both to achieve its goals and as a form of protection. 

“Employers aren’t going to do anything when they know 82,000 people are watching,” said one volunteer, who used the pseudonym Patricia. 

Despite a largely positive reception, This Is Lebanon’s methods have come in for significant criticism. Facebook commenters frequently make racist claims about domestic workers and accuse the group of fabricating its stories. 

“It doesn’t matter how much evidence we produce,” Patricia said, “there will always be people who say the domestic worker is a liar.” 

Some have also accused This Is Lebanon of being funded by Israel  — a charge frequently made against individuals and organizations who challenge Lebanon’s status quo.  

The group has responded by posting screenshots of recent donations, accompanied by the caption: “Our critics like to say we are funded by Zionists. We are mostly funded by beautiful, warm-hearted Lebanese.”

Over the past nine months of economic meltdown, the number of people contacting This Is Lebanon has doubled.

But, while the caseload has increased, its capacity to act has diminished. Donations have slowed to a trickle, and the group can no longer pressure employers into paying salaries, given that many of them are also on the edge of destitution. 

“Now, we are advising women to be patient and to endure until the airport opens fully, and to negotiate their own release, even if it means forfeiting unpaid salary,” Patricia explained. 

When Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport closed as part of a three-and-a-half-month coronavirus lockdown, thousands of workers from nations including Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Ghana, Kenya and the Philippines found themselves stuck with no money, no job and nowhere to go. 

The Philippines and Ghana managed to organize repatriation flights during the quarantine. Now that a reduced schedule is operating from Beirut, Kenya is making arrangements for small groups of citizens to be taken home by commercial airlines. 

Repeated attempts were made to contact the Ethiopian consulate for this article. Telephone calls were immediately cut off and emails went unanswered.

“Quite simply, nobody cares about us,” Yimer said. “We are invisible to the Lebanese authorities and the Ethiopian consulate.”

Photo by JOSEPH EID/AFP via Getty Images

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A recent report by a leading digital rights group in Russia paints a bleak picture of state censorship of the country’s internet. The research, published by Roskomsvoboda, a Moscow-based group that advocates for internet freedom and the protection of digital rights, examined instances in which ordinary Russians found access to the internet limited by the authorities. It counted nearly 440,000 incidents in 2019 where individuals faced some kind of barrier when trying to access information online. 

Obstacles included websites that had been blocked by the government, or the stifling of information by other measures, such as banning people from using the internet and mobile data connections. 

The report highlights concerns from digital freedoms experts that Russia is building its own parallel internet. Around the world, a number of countries are attempting to control online spaces, with China's so-called “Great Firewall” the most obvious example.

According to the report, published in February, the number of internet pages banned by Russia's state communications watchdog, Roskomnadzor, jumped from over 161,000 in 2018 to nearly 273,000 in 2019. During the same period, the number of state-sponsored cyber attacks against individuals rose from 20 to 32. 

According to Stanislav Shakirov, Roskomsvoboda’s co-founder and technical director, Russia’s crackdown on the internet begins with communication providers. “Cross-border channels have become under state control over the past 10 years,” said Shakirov. “The key players in the operator’s market, which are communication providers and data center owners, are now controlled by the authorities.”

The report highlights the government’s intensifying crackdown on the internet. Russia has introduced tough internet laws in the past five years, requiring search engines to delete some results, messaging services to share encryption keys with security services, and social networks to store their user data on servers within Russia.

Roskomnadzor’s ability to manage and block digital content was expanded last year by the introduction of the so-called “sovereign internet law.” This legislation gives the Kremlin the option to switch off digital connections within Russia or restrict access to the worldwide web in "emergency" situations. 

Internet service providers are also required to install equipment utilizing a method of data processing known as deep packet inspection (DPI), which can identify the source of traffic and filter content. In practice, DPI will allow Roskomnadzor to be more effective at blocking sites.

Deep packet inspection is often used by authoritarian governments to surveil its citizens and censor content deemed unlawful. According to Wired, DPI is the “equivalent of opening up letters in a postal depot and reading the contents.”

Russia’s DPI equipment was scheduled to begin tests on March 20, but has been indefinitely postponed, owing to the coronavirus pandemic. 

While DPI can be effective, users can avoid being surveilled by cloaking their internet activity behind a virtual private network for around $10 a month. Russia banned VPNs in 2017, but the law was only enforced last year when Roskomnadzor placed 10 popular VPN services on its blacklist.

In response, Roskomsvoboda launched a website listing currently available VPNs. 

Gustaf Björksten, chief technologist at Access Now, says that the future of the internet in Russia might more closely resemble that of Iran, where the government has been able to increase control over its digital infrastructure and even shut down internet connectivity when protests were taking place. 

“Iran has spent the past few years systematically replacing all reliance on global internet infrastructure with their own sovereign internet stack,” said Björksten. “Iran's national internet infrastructure is still connected to the global internet, but at any moment they can cut it off at the international gateways, and the entire internet stack will continue to function within Iran's borders. This is the path Russia proposes to follow.“

A Russian “kill switch” for the internet already exists. During protests last August, the nation’s three main internet providers – MeganFon, MTS and VimpelCom – all disconnected their users from mobile data.  Experts from the Internet Protection Society, a Russian NGO, described the incident as “the first state-owned shutdown in Moscow’s history.”

Russia’s policing of the internet also extends to promoting access to websites considered to be "socially important." Earlier this month, the Ministry of Communications signed an order to launch the Accessible Internet project, providing a free network that offers access to 391 approved websites. 

The list includes search engines and the websites of government agencies and banks. Also featured are pro-government newspapers and the social media platforms VK and Odnoklassniky. Foreign social media networks like Facebook and Twitter or media considered critical of Russia are not offered.  A test phase of the project runs until July 1. 

According to Alena Epifanova, a program officer at the German Council on Foreign Relations and the author of a paper on Russia’s internet laws, Russian web users will eventually tire of trying to access blocked sites. “They will simply be so severely disadvantaged that users would leave them and instead — apparently voluntarily — enter a network in which the state can exercise a greater social control.”

Additional reporting by Katerina Fomina

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The Indian government cut internet service in a bid to crack down on protests against a new citizenship law seen as discriminatory towards Muslims. Outages have been reported all over India, including in parts of New Delhi and as many as 18 cities in the state of Uttar Pradesh. 

While India’s main tech center, Bangalore, has not been impacted by the blackouts, other regional cities have been hard hit by the outages.

Abhijeet Mukherjee, 35, CEO of a tech media company called Guiding Tech, is from Ghaziabad, a city near New Delhi, which experienced more than 24 hours without internet on Friday and Saturday. On Friday morning, Mukherjee was woken at 4am by his young daughter’s cries. 

After Mukherjee settled her back to sleep, his wife checked her phone. She was greeted by a message: “Dear Customer, as per the government instructions, internet services have temporarily been stopped in your area.” 

“My entire work is on the internet,” said Mukherjee, whose company has millions of online followers. 

Mukherjee was shocked by how many major cities have been affected by the blackouts.  “The government can just block the internet without thinking about the consequences for millions,” Mukherjee said. “Imagine the plight of so many people who are dependent on the internet for their livelihoods: be it the Uber driver; the delivery man,” he said. “It's not just the highly privileged folks like me but also the daily wage earners that are getting affected.” 

“Getting cut off affects practically every aspect of people’s lives,” said Rohini Lakshané, Director of emerging research at the Bachchao Project, a collective that works to improve women’s rights through technology. “Everybody’s WhatsApp, everybody's on Facebook, and these are also used as informal methods of doing business,” she said. 

“These days the government just reacts to any kind of dissent by turning off the internet. Any kind of protest or demonstration and they shut off the internet,” said Delhi-based constitutional lawyer Gautam Bhatia. “They justify it by saying law and order is threatened.”

Even before the latest shutdowns, disconnecting the internet in India has been a knee jerk reaction of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. Since Modi came to power in 2014, the internet has been cut off over 350 times, according to Software Freedom Law Center. India is currently the internet shutdown capital of the world: it has enforced more shutdowns than every other country put together.

As Indian-controlled Kashmir enters its 140th day without internet, Kashmiri journalist Muhammad Tasim Zahid watched from Mumbai as city after city in India experienced blackouts. 

On Thursday, parts of New Delhi went offline for several hours. “It drove people crazy,’ said Zahid. ‘They were not able to tweet, not able to co-ordinate – and suddenly they realized that Kashmiris have not been able to do this for 140 days.”

Both Vodafone and Airtel’s mobile internet services were down for four hours. Neither carrier has yet issued a public statement about the outages. 

The outage in New Delhi was a rarity: until then, the government had not inflicted comprehensive blackouts on any of India’s ten major “metro” cities. The economic effects, Lakshané said, would be dramatic: “The government and trading centers would not be able to function,” she said. “Which is why they only use the tactic mostly in far-flung areas or smaller cities where the losses are less apparent.” 

The effects, however, are still significant: “People lose business, people lose revenue, financial transactions cannot be done, people cannot withdraw money from ATMs, they cannot swipe credit cards or debit cards,” Lakshané explained, describing how certain areas were experiencing a “cash crunch” as a result, with people having to stand in line at banks to withdraw money.

Makepeace Sitlhou, a journalist in the northeastern state of Assam, experienced prolonged blackouts as protests intensified in the city of Guwahati last week. First, mobile network services were cut off, swiftly followed by WiFi. 

Silthou described how her colleagues rented hotel rooms for hours at a time to use their government-sanctioned internet services to file stories, or “mooched” off spotty government-run WiFi through the walls of their neighbors’ house. “It took us back to dial-up days, you know – it was a good throwback for us. That’s how we intermittently worked.”

The Indian government authorizes these shutdowns under a colonial-era legal framework called the Telegraph Act, which allows those in power to control and monitor all forms of communication. The act first came into force in 1885 and has since been amended as technology developed.

Indian citizens are already looking at ways to resist the shutdowns. “People are installing peer-to-peer messaging apps, they’re trying to install FireWire,” said Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia Pacific Policy Director at Access Now and co-founder of India's Internet Freedom Foundation. 

People are looking to “mesh” internet networks on their phones and apps, meaning they no longer have to rely on mobile carriers. Another popular tactic is to use an app called Bridgefy which hops messages through phones using Bluetooth. 

The latest shutdowns in India have also caught the attention of other world powers. On Tuesday, Chinese state-run media outlet the People’s Daily commented that the Indian government’s shutdown was important for safeguarding national security. “The necessary regulation of the internet” should become “standard practice for sovereign countries,” the article read. 

The increasing use of shutdowns is a source of concern to internet freedom advocates. “It violates the right to free speech and expression,” said Gautam Bhatia, the lawyer in Delhi. “At a very basic and fundamental level, you can’t speak without the internet.”

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“I thought I managed to change passwords but two, three minutes later I saw that I was removed from all of the pages, including the ones I have created myself,” he said.

While Karimov battled the hacking of his accounts, the administrators of another Facebook page, Azadliq Radio, Azerbaijan Service for Radio Free Europe were also hacked. Over the next three to four hours, staff realized they had lost all their video content—over 2,000 videos, posts and photos. The station also lost some 25,000 of its 500,000 followers.

This was not the first time these pages were targeted, nor are they the only media organizations in Azerbaijan to fall victim to hacking. The independent Turan News Agency was targeted by authorities last year and its editor in chief was briefly arrested in a tax-evasion and abuse-of-power investigation. Last January, the Facebook page of the Berlin-based Meydan TV—a news site which covers events in Azerbaijan in three languages—lost control of its Facebook page. During the time the page was inaccessible to its administrators, the channel lost all its posts and one fifth of its 500,000 followers. In all cases, it was eventually possible to restore access to the pages and accounts.

Azerbaijan’s enforcing of limits of control across social media is one example of how governments across the world are placing obstacles to deter the work of journalists and organizers.

The attacker of Karimov’s Facebook account was traced back to an IP address revealed in the email received by the journalist. It was linked to a company called Enginet, a limited liability company describing itself as a multifunction company specializing in advanced information technologies in Azerbaijan. While there is little publicly available information on Enginet, its ownership has been traced to Azerbaijan’s former Chief of the Information Systems Department of the Ministry of Education, Samir Mammadov.

More puzzling was the timing and the reason behind the attack. Azadliq Radio, Meydan TV and a number of other popular opposition and independent online news sites have been blocked in Azerbaijan since early 2017. Although users can circumnavigate the bans using virtual private networks, it is possible the authorities were testing the limits of new surveillance technology with a campaign of online disruption.

Azerbaijan’s enforcing of limits of control across social media is one example of how governments across the world are placing obstacles to deter the work of journalists and organizers. Ahead of elections in Bangladesh in December, authorities suspended both 3G and 4G services across the country for several hours. More recently, in Zimbabwe—amid violent protests against the doubling of the price of fuel—the government blocked all internet access. Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum accused the authorities of cutting off the internet "to mask the massive human rights violations".

Mike Runey, a senior program officer for Eurasia at Civil Rights Defenders and one of the authors of “Azerbaijan’s digital crackdown requires a political solution” said the attacks were designed to intimidate the media. “Our read was the attacks were meant as the online equivalent of a break-in when burglars ransack the place but leave the safe and valuables untouched,” he wrote in an email. “The goal was to intimidate and drive home the idea that this is not a safe place.”

Other similar hacking attempts have involved Facebook pages of opposition political figures and activists. In the run-up to the snap presidential election in April 2018, former presidential candidate, Camil Hasanli reported losing 75,000 out of 108,350 subscribers of his page and all of the personal posts, videos and articles he had shared since 2013. More recently, on January 20, Ali Karimli, leader of opposition political party Popular Front, reported his personal Facebook page hacked and all its content deleted.

But while attacks on pages of Hasanli could be explained within the context of an upcoming election, the disruption experienced by Karimov and Azadliq Radio is indicative of a new approach which has seen the hiring of more sophisticated hackers equipped with more sophisticated technology to prevent access to independent media and alternative voices.

Disruptive Technology

According to detailed reporting carried out in April 2018, by Virtual Road—a secure hosting project run by the media foundation Qurium, the government of Azerbaijan has been relying on Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) since March 2017. DPI extracts information by allowing digital eavesdropping. If conventional online eavesdropping is like picking up a book and only seeing its cover, DPI allows users to open the book and read it from cover to cover.

According to Virtual Road, Azerbaijan’s DPI equipment was purchased from an Israeli security company called Allot Communications; the same company sold similar technology to Iran in 2011. Reports by Virtual Road have shown evidence of denial of service and other attacks against independent and opposition media news sites, that were traced to IP addresses associated with the government.

In 2014, Citizen Lab revealed that Azerbaijan was among 21 countries using Remote Control System (RCS), another form of surveillance technology that allows for data collection on infected devices both online and offline. Other countries suspected of using RCS include Colombia, Egypt, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Uzbekistan. The data is obtained through records by keystroke loggers and the system also allows hackers to turn on device cameras and microphones without the user’s knowledge.

Trolling and Spear Phishing

While spear phishing and hacking of social media accounts are two common ways to impede the work of journalists and activists, other forms of digital intimidation and surveillance include impersonating accounts, takedown requests, trolling and blackmail.

One recent incident saw a reporter from Azadliq Radio pressured by a harasser called Teyyub Khalilov on Facebook messenger to reveal information about her colleague. This happened shortly after the radio station’s Facebook page was hacked. Although Khalilov’s account was taken down by Facebook after six hours, the incident impacted the journalist and her colleagues.

Organizations who find their Facebook pages repeatedly attacked eventually move to other mediums, which can adversely impact their audiences.

State-sponsored trolling has also been widely employed over the past few years. Content which originates from trolls gathers around certain events, such as elections, referendums and political rallies when trolls copy and paste articles including speeches given by the president and other officials in pro-government media. They also engage in spear phishing in comments under Facebook posts and YouTube videos. When a Facebook page is hacked, its new owners spare no time in sending out malicious or infected links.

The same patterns can also be seen in other authoritarian countries like Russia and Ecuador. In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte used trolls to work for his 2016 presidential campaign. Political groups in India like Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party can mobilize thousands of members to attack political opponents.

The effects of state-sponsored disruption of online services are not solely limited to censorship. Organizations who find their Facebook pages repeatedly attacked eventually move to other mediums, which can adversely impact their audiences. “People organized before the current iteration of social media and will do so after, so even if Azerbaijani Facebook becomes so dangerous or toxic that people abandon the platform, it will just move to another medium”, said Runey, in an email to Coda.

“At the end of the day, however, this isn’t solely about finding technological solutions to these technological problems. Even extremely repressive and authoritarian governments recognize this, or will have to eventually, which is why China has, despite deploying unprecedented tools of 21st century mass surveillance and intimidation in Xinjiang, resorted to the 20th century tool of mass internment camps.”

On November 29, human rights lawyer Nijat Mammadbayli received an email from an individual purporting to be Hebib Muntezir, the social media manager at Meydan TV. The email appeared to have been sent from Slack but asked Nijat to confirm that munhab@protonmail.com was Hebib’s email address. Mammadbayli knew this was a trap and when he went to check the email again a few days later, the email contained a warning, “Be careful with this message. Similar messages were used to steal people’s personal information. Unless you trust the sender, don’t click links, or reply with personal information”.

The YouTube channels of independent and opposition media outlets are also often subject to targeted attacks. Last July, “Azad Soz” (Free Speech) was blocked on YouTube after receiving three strikes, due to “copyright violations”. The alleged source of the takedown request originated with the Ministry of the Interior, however, the email address cited on the request pointed to ladam4584@gmail.com, not the official email of the Ministry of the Interior—info@mia.gov.az. Hamam Times is another popular YouTube channel that faces takedown requests on a regular basis.

Journalists say Azerbaijan’s disruption of the internet, using laws and malware attacks to hamper the work of civil groups and independent voices, ultimately damages trust in the media.

“When attacks take place, they weaken the trust public has vested in us,” said Meydan TV social media manager Hebib Muntezir. “We receive all kinds of information and leaks from our audience, but once our accounts are compromised or hacked and their personal information is exposed, we endanger them, the trust suffers”.

The post Surveillance and Internet Disruption in Baku appeared first on Coda Story.

Most Google services were down too, for all Russian internet users. That mean not only search, Gmail and YouTube, but less high-profile but nonetheless critical services such as CAPTCHA — the widely-used system for verifying that a log-on comes from a real human rather than a bot. With this out of action, many websites were effectively locked shut.

Services provided by other foreign online giants such as Amazon were offline too. The list went on and on. Car dealerships couldn’t process insurance payments. Passengers had trouble checking in for flights. Video-gamers were locked out of their favorite daily addiction.

In the process, Russians were also getting an insight into some of the internet’s more obscure inner workings — and how dependent they were on services outside their borders. The editor of the country’s most popular sports news site announced that they had lost all their type fonts, because the are provided and hosted externally by Google. The internet was literally disappearing in front of the eyes of Russian users.

In all, an estimated 20 million different links, websites and online services had become unavailable within Russia. Codaru.com, Coda Story’s sister website, was among them, because its hosting service was one of the sites affected.

But it wasn’t a technical failure that had caused all this online chaos. It was the Russian government — specifically its media watchdog agency, Roskomnadzor. And all because it wanted to ban a single messaging app, Telegram.

It was the culmination of a battle going back several years. The FSB, Russia’s main domestic intelligence service, has been leading the charge, accusing Telegram of giving the Islamic State and other extremists free reign to use its channels to communicate and inspire attacks.

What has really sparked the FSB’s ire, though, is the refusal of Telegram bosses to grant access to users’ communications. And when it refused to comply with a court ruling earlier this year, demanding that it hand over the necessary encryption keys, the government began its cyber-offensive to try to close the app down.

But while the Russian government is accused of all kinds of high-tech cleverness in interfering in elections and information warfare abroad, it hasn’t lived up to that image on the home front. In fact, its battle with Telegram has turned into a humiliating own-goal, making it look incompetent while also inflicting billions of rubles of losses on Russian business.

Blatant hypocrisy

Faced with a barrage of criticism and outright scorn, Roskomnadzor threw in the towel in early May and started unblocking large groups of IP (internet protocol) addresses. And after all this, Telegram itself is still available, albeit with a sometimes spotty connection.

Along the way, it has exposed the weaknesses of the Russian censorship machine, as well as the government’s blatant hypocrisy. Russian Telegram users barely make up 10 percent of its global base, but it is used by everyone of any importance in the country.

Even after the ban came into effect senior officials admitted that they were still using Telegram — including Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. He said he saw “nothing wrong” in doing so.

When a Russian parliamentarian asked her Facebook followers not to contact her on Telegram — because the messages weren’t getting through — the spokeswoman for the Russian prime minister, Natalya Timakova, responded with a note saying they could install a VPN (a virtual private network service) to circumvent the ban, because “it’s just so easy.” She later claimed she had meant this as a joke.

Opposition channel

The story of Telegram has been one of relentless friction with the Russian government, since the app was first launched by its founder Pavel Durov. Russian lawmakers first floated the idea of banning it in 2015, on the grounds its channels were being used by the self-styled Islamic State. Durov famously retorted: “I suggest banning words. Reportedly, they are used by terrorists to communicate.”

Telegram does indeed have a history of being used by IS to recruit and train, and in at least one confirmed instance, to coordinate attacks. The FSB goes further, saying that the app has been used in almost every recent terror incident on Russian soil.

But Telegram is also the communication channel of choice for many Russian opposition groups, something that also irks the Kremlin’s intelligence agencies.

Two years ago, the government started turning up the heat. It introduced an amendment to Russia’s anti-terrorism legislation requiring any service involved in the “dissemination of information” to decrypt customer messages at the request of the FSB.

Durov refused, telling the Russian authorities that he would wipe out the extremists’ channels himself, without compromising Telegram users’ privacy.

But that did not sit well with the FSB, and the case went all the way to Russia’s Supreme Court. And in March, it ruled in the government’s favor. Durov again refused to hand over his encryption keys, and so in April Roskomnadzor began trying to block Telegram in Russia

It wasn’t so straightforward. For one thing, Russia’s online watchdog is not as powerful as you might think. It can’t block websites on its own. Instead, it is more like a go-between, following the orders of law enforcement agencies and then passing them on to internet service providers (ISPs), telling them to bar certain IP addresses.

The larger, federally-owned providers usually act on these orders immediately. Smaller, regional providers take longer though, and sometimes ignore the orders completely, which is why supposedly banned websites can remain online for hours and even days.

But Roskomnadzor compounded its own weaknesses by showing an amateurish level of understanding of how Telegram works. It is an app, not a website, which means that it is not bound to a single IP address.

Yet the online censor initially targeted it by ordering ISPs to block addresses directly associated with Telegram, including its home page and the web version of its chat service. But that did little to hamper the messenger service’s functionality. Even after the ban came into effect senior officials admitted that they were still using Telegram — including Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov. He said he saw “nothing wrong” in doing so.

For its part, Telegram immediately launched a deft campaign of counter measures — embarrassing the government still further. It sent new settings to users, allowing them to circumvent the ban, and started using a technique called “domain fronting,” which made it appear as though users were accessing entirely different services when they were actually on Telegram.

That is when the collateral damage started to spread across the Russian internet.

When Roskomnadzor realized it was being outfoxed, it reacted by ordering the cyber-equivalent of carpet-bombing, ordering ISPs to block entire subnets, or groups of IP addresses, which Telegram was using for domain fronting.

Even Russian IT giants close to the government, such as Yandex and Mail.ru, were hit. Initially reluctant to oppose the campaign against Telegram publicly, they lost patience when Roskomnadzor briefly added them to its “black list.”

The agency tried to save face by saying that it wasn’t actually attempting to ban the app, but only to “degrade” it. In fact, Telegram was actually growing, gaining thousands of new Russian users as a result of the government’s very public effort to squash it.

One of Telegram’s defining features is its “channels.” In essence, it is a simple blogging platform that allows anyone to broadcast their views and messages to an audience of their choosing. There are channels specializing in feminist writing, history and cooking, and more general political commentary groups with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

There are also numerous pro-Kremlin channels, both promoting government policy and attacking the opposition. Pro-Kremlin figures also run their own Telegram channels. The editor-in-chief of the government-owned RT network, Margarita Simonyan, has 13,000 subscribers, while RT Russian has almost 50,000 — and both channels have remained active even after the ban.

Telegram has also become an important advertising platform for Russian businesses, with many using popular channels to promote their products and services. So the attempt to ban the service has hit hard, causing losses estimated as high as $2 billion dollars.

The debacle has also been a blow to the government’s long-held hopes of exerting greater control over the internet. The Russian authorities have long toyed with the idea of copying the Chinese model and establishing “online sovereignty” — that is, cutting Russia off almost entirely from the global internet.

But the Kremlin was always going to struggle to achieve this, according to Andrei Soldatov, an expert on the Russian security services and author of “The Red Web,” a book on the country’s digital battles.

China built up its internet infrastructure “with total state control in mind,” he said in an interview, “while Russia only introduced content filtration in 2012.” What is more, Soldatov added, “a whole segment of China’s tech industry is aimed at controlling the online behaviour of individual users.” And all Chinese have to have a surveillance app on their phones. “I wouldn’t credit the civil society with this victory and wouldn’t even call it a victory.” — Sergey Smirnov

Russia, by contrast, is using “the same age-old methods” to try to exert control on the internet, argues Soldatov. And it does not have the equivalent of China’s “Great Firewall,” with the capacity to isolate itself from the rest of the world.

Another crucial difference is that China’s domestic online market is big enough (the biggest in the world, in fact) to be almost entirely self-sufficient. While Russia has homegrown online giants such as Yandex or Vkontakte, it is still deeply dependent on outside services.

So what happens next? Anton Merkurov, an internet expert, says this is a strategic defeat for the Russian government. “The Digital Resistance [a phrase coined by Pavel Durov] did really shine while the state’s impotence couldn’t be more obvious.” As much as the government wants to censor more, Merkurov adds, they’re simply not technically competent enough to do so.

Merkurov predicts a increasing conflict between the state and what he believes is a growing community of tech-savvy individuals who reject censorship, and he says the state will lose.

But not everyone is so optimistic. Sergey Smirnov, the editor in chief of Mediazona, a crowdfunded website that covers political trials and the prison system, is wary. “I wouldn’t credit the civil society with this victory and wouldn’t even call it a victory. This time they weren’t prepared from a technical standpoint, but they’ll draw conclusions for the next time.”

The post Why did Russia just attack its own internet? appeared first on Coda Story.