The Muslim Brotherhood's website has been inaccessible to Egyptians for the past week. Reem Nafie searches for a virtual censor Last week, Egyptian visitors to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood's official website -- ikhwanonline.com -- were unable to access it. At first, Abdel-Gelil El-Sharnoubi, the site's manager, thought there was a technical problem. When it became clear, however, that people outside Egypt could still see it, El-Sharnoubi concluded that the government must be preventing access to the website. The Interior Ministry, however, said they had nothing to do with the matter. Major-General Hamdi Abdel-Karim, assistant to the interior minister, told Al-Ahram Weekly that the ministry was not responsible for the site's inaccessibility in Egypt. The Muslim Brotherhood "always blames us", Abdel-Karim said, whenever anything goes wrong with their site. Abdel-Karim suggested that the Ministry of Communication and Information and Technology (MCIT) could be the source of the site's "technical problem". An MCIT source said the ministry was not aware of the problem in the first place. The website serves as the online portal of the Muslim Brotherhood, featuring news of the group's activities as well as the latest Islamic- related news. Two months ago, the site also became inaccessible to users in Saudi Arabia. When the group tried to mirror the portal with ".org" and ".net" domain names, those were also promptly banned in both Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The brotherhood's spokesman, Badr Mohamed Badr, said it wasn't the first time the government had wrangled with the group's web presence. Badr said the website's former manager was arrested in May on charges of posting news that aimed to "incite the public against the government". The site's premises were also shut down at around the same time. The fact that he was released a few days later, analysts said, probably meant that the police objective had been merely one of intimidation. Badr accused the government of using its "technical control" over Egypt's four main backbone Internet service providers to make the site inaccessible to Egyptian web surfers. He said the move "conflicts with [the government's] claims of media freedom in Egypt". Shaab.com, the online presence of the Islamist-oriented Labour Party, was also allegedly subjected to government filtering. Although Al-Shaab newspaper was shut down by the government several years ago, the website had continued to run until recently. Saudi Arabia and China are known to monitor what their people are logging onto, through an Internet Services Unit (ISU). While users may subscribe to a number of local Internet service providers, all web traffic is apparently forwarded through a central array of proxy servers at the ISU, which implements Internet content filtering. Could the same thing be going on here? Although the Interior Ministry has consistently denied that it has an Internet monitoring unit, IT experts said such filtering would be technically possible since the majority of Egypt's Internet traffic flows into the country from a main underground pipe that can be accessed by the government. Compounding the confusion, Badr said, was the fact that the authorities have thus far made no public statement about whether or not the site has been censored. Several other Islamic websites, including daawa.com, were also not accessible from Egypt last week. Although Abdel-Karim denied that the Interior Ministry had any role in "Islamic Internet related problems", Badr said he was certain that the ministry was behind the move. "If they didn't think the site posed a problem for them," Badr asked, "why would they have arrested the former site manager before?" Regular visitors to the site -- although uncertain why it was not working -- were disappointed that they could not access it. Housewife Khadija Fahmi wondered why "the government leaves websites that publish illicit pictures alone, and shuts down useful Islamic sites that our children need to read." As the Weekly went to press, the website remained inaccessible in Egypt. Badr predicted that the site would probably remain inaccessible as long as the government insisted on "suppressing the Islamic influence in Egypt".
