State-sanctioned internet blackouts prove to be deadly
Governments are using online shutdowns to control information ‘more than previously thought’
LATE in a December evening Masrat Jan, a 40-year-old mother of four from the village of Sangria Barzol in Indian-administered Kashmir, developed a sudden chest pain.
Her family took her to the nearest hospital. But because it had no cardiac specialists, she was referred to another facility more than another hour’s drive away. She died there five minutes after arrival – a collateral victim, doctors explained, of a draconian security environment.
“The doctors told us if there was internet, they could have contacted the cardiologists in Srinagar and stabilised her,” her father, Gul Mohammad Shah, said. “She would have survived had there been an internet service available.”
India’s government shut down internet, mobile phone and landline services in Kashmir before stripping the region of its partial autonomy on Aug 5 2019, saying it wanted to stave off civilian protests.
The Kashmir blackout, which finally ended earlier this month, stood out because of its record length and because it was imposed by a democratic government. But it is far from unique.
At any time over the past year or so, at least one part of the planet has been subject to an internet blackout by its own government, often at a shocking cost in freedom, prosperity and lives.
In July 2020, Ethiopia, East Africa’s biggest economy and most important transport hub, imposed a blackout for nearly three weeks on the pretext of trying to suppress hate speech.
From Aug 9 to 12, authorities in Belarus cut the country off from the internet while police conducted a violent crackdown on protesters angered by President Alexander Lukashenko’s apparently fraudulent election “victory”.
Authorities in Uganda pulled a similar trick in January amid a sustained crackdown on opponents of President Yoweri Museveni during presidential elections.
And on Feb 1, military authorities in Myanmar imposed their own blanket internet blackout as cover for their coup against Aung San Suu Kyi – ironically as they lifted a more local 18-month shutdown in the conflicttorn Rakhine and Chin states. They cut the country off again the following weekend, and for the past two weeks have been imposing a nightly blackout from 1am to 9am.
The alarming truth, said Alp Toker, a British artificial intelligence technologist who five years ago set up NetBlocks, an observatory that monitors the tactic, is that “internet shutdowns have always been there, but the world has not always been good at tracking them”.
He added: “It turns out they are more prevalent than previously thought and they come in a variety of forms from regional shutdowns to nation scale shutdowns.
“The most damaging ones are the near-total information vacuum in which misinformation can spread and information is dominated by government.”
For authoritarian governments, the appeal of shutting down communications is obvious.
It disrupts opposition groups trying to organise on social media or messaging apps, gives the government a monopoly on information, and makes it extremely difficult for international media and foreign governments to uncover atrocities.
Above all, it induces fear. “We notice a pattern,” Nwe Oo, a woman who has been active in the protests in Yangon since the Feb 1 coup in Myanmar, said. “When the internet is cut at night, the regime starts to arrest civil society activists and public servants who are part of the civil disobedience movement.
“The blackout is affecting almost all the things we do in our protests. Everyone is in the dark and we don’t know if there’s police violence nearby.”
Those failures point to two inherent problems for governments contemplating internet blackouts. black There is a practical challenge: challenge unless a country’s internet infrastruct infrastructure, like China’s, was constructed from the ground up to allow censorshi censorship, it is difficult to make a blackout watertight. w
In Myanmar, some protest protesters use VPNs and smuggled Thai Sim cards to help circumvent the blocking of social media platforms as well as the blackouts. In Belarus, small service s providers allowed enough b bandwidth to send emails during the th three-day August shutdown. Certain powerful VPNs circumvented the we weekly shutdowns to coincide wit with Sunday rallies.
Secondly, it involves self self-inflicted collateral damage in terms of economic losses, social disru disruption, and lives. NetBlocks’ cost of s shutdown tool puts the damage of a sing single day’s total blackout in Myanmar at over $24million. It says Belarus’ th three-day shutdown cost $170million. M Mr Toker, who built the tool, says it chim chimes with other estimates. “It is a lot. Yo You are basically carrying out a cyber attack on your own population,” he sai said.