When it saw the size of Egypt’s protests in 2011, its government decided to cut off the internet. A combative journalist, Nora Younis, then editor of the Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper, found out that the InterContinental Cairo Semiramis hotel did have them. It was perfect, because it overlooked Tahrir Square itself, where the regime’s repression was savage, with law enforcement shooting and running over the crowd. Younis filmed everything and uploaded it to his medium’s website, and from there it jumped to the rest of the world.
The Internet was a key part of that revolution, and of those that set fire to some neighboring countries.
In 2016, when Egypt returned to authoritarianism, that journalist set up her own medium, Al Manassa, which combined spontaneous contributions with research journalism.
A year later, Al Manassa disappeared from the network. Although only in Egypt; in the rest of the world it was accessible, but of little use.
So Younis changed servers, until she was discovered and caught. And she changed again and they covered her again.
In the following three years it migrated a dozen times to other servers. In this strategy he asked for help from Qurium, a Swedish non-profit organization dedicated to the forensic investigation of the digital environment.
Qurium discovered that the blocks against Al Manassa were being run by a Canadian technology company called Sandvine.
It’s a little-known company outside of specialist circles, but tech geeks are comparing it to NSO Group, the creator and marketer of Pegasus – does that ring a bell?
This company, according to an investigation by Wired magazine, is a group called Francisco Partners, which provides advanced technology to Internet service providers and telecommunications companies.
The most powerful tool developed by Sandvine is DPI (which translates as “deep packet inspection”), which is used to analyze traffic and prioritize some content over others. It serves, for example, to give priority to streaming services to avoid microcuts in transmissions. It has sometimes been used to detect images of child sexual abuse. Nothing we don’t applaud.
But the diagnoses carried out by entities defending digital rights such as Qurium, Accés Now or Citizen Lab – also Canadian, like Sandvine – show that this technology can be used to divert traffic to dead ends, so that it becomes invisible , and which has been sold to governments such as Azerbaijan, Syria, Turkey and Belarus.
All these entities have repeatedly protested the sale of this technology to regimes with improved democratic standards.
In 2022, a Bloomberg investigation found that Sandvine had done business with… Russia, where the government set up a system of spying and censorship that reached as far as Siberia. It is true that when the invasion of Ukraine began the company withdrew from this market, but it is also true that the complaints of the entities defending digital rights fell on deaf ears for years, and were only heard when the word Russia was heard.
Sandvine spokeswoman Susana Schwartz told Wired that “Sandvine solutions help provide a reliable and secure Internet, and we take allegations of misuse very seriously.”
Recently, the American government has written Sandvine on its list of “prohibited companies”, those with which firms in its country cannot do business. In practice, they have blasted it. What a coincidence it was after this Russia thing was revealed…
So the first information that appeared yesterday on the website of Al Manassa gave a remarkable chestnut to the government of Egypt. It was detailed that 29.7% of the population of Egypt subsists within the parameters of poverty, resisting with 804.5 pounds per day (around €15). It also detailed that these data were from four years ago, because despite the fact that the Constitution obliges to make them public, the government has been doing so since 2020. So now younis can’t cut off the internet – at least with Sandvine – but they can slap the Constitution and hide the data. Does it sound like them?
