Starting on May 24th, the Egyptian government ordered ISPs to block at least 21 news websites on the grounds of “supporting terrorism and spreading lies”. In an attempt to understand which sites were blocked and how, ooniprobe network measurement software – designed to examine internet censorship – was run in three local vantage points in the country.
So far, we have been able to identify and confirm the blocking of ten news websites, including madamasr.com, aljazeera.net, and eight others. It remains unclear to us though if all ten sites have been blocked under the Egyptian government’s recent order.
Unfortunately, we also found access to censorship circumvention software to be blocked as well. Link Egypt appears to be blocking access to the Tor network, though it appears to currently be accessible from the Telecom Egypt (TE) and Vodafone networks. We also found torproject.org, the Tor bridges website, and even our own site (which enables users to measure internet censorship) to be blocked in some networks.
Through the collection and analysis of network measurement data we were able to determine that Egyptian ISPs are using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology to RESET connections to sites.
Read the report here.
Publisher: Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) & Access Now
Publication date: 19th June 2017