Egyptian president tackles online dissent by threatening visitors to sites
EGYPT has adopted a law that threatens to jail anyone who browses censored websites, after having already blocked dozens of sites belonging to human rights groups and critical media.
The law, ratified on Saturday by president Abdel Fattah al-sisi, gives courts the power to block websites deemed a threat to national security.
The decision may be appealed, but if upheld, anyone who browses the censored websites faces at least one year in prison and a fine.
Sharing content from those websites could result in a minimum prison sentence of two years.
Starting last year, Egypt began blocking websites of news organisations such as Qatar’s Al Jazeera, which has supported the banned Muslim Brotherhood group, and the web pages of some organisations such as Human Rights Watch, which published reports on rights abuses. The Huffington Post was also banned, after its Arabic website published articles critical of the Egyptian leadership. A security official had anonymously confirmed last year that several websites have been blocked, but the government had refused to go on record to confirm the censorship. Now that the law has formalised the ban, it is unclear whether browsing the websites censored last year by using a virtual private networks (VPNS), which can be downloaded on smartphones, is illegal.
“They left the law deliberately elastic,” said Gamal Eid, a rights lawyer and director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information.
Egypt has also blocked access to many VPNS, ostensibly to prevent internet users from circumventing the censorship.
The government has shown little tolerance for dissent after Mr Sisi, then the leader of the military, overthrew Mohamed Morsi, the Islamist president, in 2013 following mass protests.
Mr Morsi’s overthrow unleashed a deadly crackdown on Islamists and attacks by jihadists.
Police have been rounding up vocal, influential dissidents on social media.
Egypt had passed another law that defines any social media account with more than 5,000 followers as a media organisation under the supervision of a state-appointed media supervisory council.