Libya Blocks Internet Access As Citizens Protest 93
An anonymous reader writes "As protests rage across the Middle East, in particular gaining strength in Libya, Djibouti, Iraq, Bahrain, and Yemen over the past two days, Libya has taken the lead role in blocking internet access to its citizens. Residents of Tripoli, Libya are reporting wide-spread internet blockage for most sites, and access to circumvention tools like OperaTor and VPN is also being blocked."
Re:Great idea! Quite original! (Score:5, Interesting)
If the news reports are any accurate, the main reason for the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt is economic. Libya is a wealthier if not economically more equal country than either. So maybe the scale of discontent is lower in Libya, and killing the Internet just "might" be the straw that will break the back of the protests.
But if this move fails and there's another regime change (for better or worse), then the leaders of a certain economic superpower [wikipedia.org] should be worried. On the other hand, that country may have just the antivirus for popular discontent: high growth rates and a more or less regular change of faces at the top, where the Great Leader isn't Papa's favorite but selected by an inner circle in what works out as a form of extremely hierarchical representative democracy.
This happened in Egypt (Score:5, Interesting)
and it did NOT work!
I was one of the ppl, who actually joined the revolution due to the fact that I did not have an internet connection.
So i went to Tahrir square. To my surprise, i found thousands like myself, who found themselves there because they could not
get their updates online, so decided to go see whats going on, and then latter on got involved. It even got worse when the gov. cut of news channles like Jazeera.
What i am noticing is extreme insanity, because you would think that there is some kind of analyst or adviser who saw that happen in Egypt and decided it was a bad idea, but nooooo..they are just too smart for that. Its the same school of thought i guess.