Amid Digital Blackout, Anonymous Mass-Faxes WikiLeaks Cables To Egypt
Egypt has dropped a digital iron curtain over its Internet. So WikiLeaks’ fans are using an analog tool to smuggle the secret-spilling site’s latest scandals into the country: fax machines.
On Friday afternoon, the loose hacker group Anonymous began a campaign to fax thousands of copies of WikiLeaks’ latest missives–a series of State Department cables revealing human rights abuses under Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and tacit U.S. backing for his administration–to Egyptian numbers.
Since Thursday night, Egypt has blocked its four largest Internet service providers, Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, and Etisalat Misr. But landlines remain connected–and so, Anonymous believes, do landline-connected fax machines. “We stand up for the little guy as well as fighting the government,” one source within Anonymous writes to me. “We believe the people need to see the truth, which is why we’re faxing locations in Egypt (especially schools) with copies of a relevant WikiLeaks cable; due to the majority of Egyptian Internet being down, the public cannot access this vital information.”