Websites belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood became inaccessible less than one hour after elections started early today. Around ten websites that began this morning posting news about the elections and reporting incidents of harassment of Brotherhood supporters are no longer accessible from within Egypt. Fatehi Fawzi, who works at a website that belongs to the Brotherhood, said news websites that provide coverage in English and Arabic had been tampered with by entities he declined to name. Fawzi added that the Brotherhood will resort to SMS messaging to inform reporters of election updates. An IT security specialist told Al-Masry Al-Youm, "I have tried to access ikhwanonline.com using several proxies outside Egypt and it's working fine, this means that someone blocked the traffic that comes and goes to ikhwanonline.com from the Egypt international backbone. Only someone with privilege over the international backbone can do that in this case." Several Brotherhood websites, including ikhwanonline.com, started publishing news about election abuses, including measures preventing the group's supporters and representatives from accessing polling stations and arrests of some of the Brotherhood's candidates before the poll. The Brotherhood accuses the government of planning to rig the election.
