Hello,

Today OONI and Egypt's AFTE published a joint research report on the state of internet censorship in Egypt.

* Full report in English: https://ooni.io/documents/Egypt-Internet-Censorship-AFTE-OONI-2018-07.pdf

* Full report in Arabic: https://ooni.io/documents/Egypt-Internet-Censorship-AFTE-OONI-2018-07.AR.pdf

* Summary of the report in English: https://ooni.io/post/egypt-internet-censorship/ & https://blog.torproject.org/egypt-internet-censorship

* Summary of the report in Arabic: https://ooni.io/documents/summary-egypt-internet-censorship-arabic.pdf

You may remember that AFTE previously reported on hundreds of websites being blocked in Egypt.

OONI and AFTE have now joined forces. We conducted a comprehensive study based on the analysis of OONI Probe measurements collected from multiple local vantage points over the last year and a half.

More than 1,000 URLs presented signs of network interference, 178 of which seem to most likely have been consistently blocked throughout the testing period. The majority of these URLs include media websites, human rights sites, circumvention tools and sites expressing political criticism.

More than 100 URLs that belong to media organizations were blocked, even though Egyptian authorities have only officially ordered the blocking of 21 news websites. AFTE interviewed journalists working with Egyptian media organizations whose websites got blocked to examine the impact of censorship. Many Egyptian journalists reported that the censorship has had a severe impact on their work and that some media organizations have been forced to suspend their operations entirely as a result of persisting internet censorship.

Egyptian ISPs primarily block sites through the use of Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology that resets connections. In some cases, instead of RST injection, ISPs drop packets, suggesting a variance in filtering rules. In other cases, ISPs interfere with the SSL encrypted traffic between Cloudflare's Point-of-Presence in Cairo and the backend servers of sites (pshiphon.ca, purevpn.com and ultrasawt.com) hosted outside of Egypt.

Egyptian ISPs also appear to apply "defense in depth" tactics for network filtering by adding extra layers of censorship, making circumvention harder. This is suggested by the blocking of Egypt's Freedom and Justice Party's (FJP) site, which was blocked by two different middleboxes, as well as by the blocking of numerous circumvention tools.

Apart from pervasive levels of internet censorship, Egyptian ISPs were found to hijack unencrypted HTTP connections and inject redirects to ads and cryptocurrency mining scripts. We first detected this back in 2016, when we reported that state-owned Telecom Egypt was hijacking unencrypted connections to porn sites and redirecting them to ads. The Citizen Lab significantly expanded upon this research in their latest Sandvine report. Now, following the analysis of thousands of measurements collected from the last year and a half, we have enough evidence to believe that (many) Egyptian ISPs are carrying out an ad campaign. The affected sites are diverse, including the sites of the Palestinian Prisoner Society, the Women's Initiative for Gender Justice, as well as a number of LGBTQI and Israeli sites. Even the sites of the UN were affected by this ad campaign!

We will continue to monitor internet censorship in Egypt and around the world. We therefore welcome any feedback you may have.

Thanks for reading!

All the best,

Maria.