15-Year-Old Egyptian Cyber Activist Takes on Israel
Last week, when the Israel Defense Forces threatened to pull the switch on the Internet in Gaza, Nour Haridy wanted a backup plan. So the 15-year-old high-school student from Cairo went on Twitter and asked in Arabic and English for help on how Gazans could get back online in the event of a shutoff.
15-Year-Old Egyptian Cyber Activist Takes on Israel
by Eli Lake
The Daily Beast
Nov 21, 2012
How one teenager helped prep Gazans for an Internet shut off—with the help of Anonymous. Eli Lake reports.
Last week, when the Israel Defense Forces threatened to pull the switch on the Internet in Gaza, Nour Haridy wanted a backup plan. So the 15-year-old high-school student from Cairo went on Twitter and asked in Arabic and English for help on how Gazans could get back online in the event of a shutoff.
What happened next shows the fine line between so-called cyberactivism—or using social media and the Internet to fight an information war—and hacking, the often illegal art of breaking into websites, email accounts, and other online domains for profit, fun, or a political cause.
Haridy says he got many responses on Twitter, but the most promising were from people who said they were affiliated with Anonymous, a group of activist hackers that famously attacked the websites of the U.S. Department of Justice and companies it deemed enemies of WikiLeaks such as MasterCard and Amazon.
Haridy soon found himself talking to the Anonymous hackers through a Gaza-specific Internet Relay Chat, a secure mode of communications favored by hackers, activists, and gamers. In those first conversations, Haridy says the hackers from Anonymous agreed to create a step-by-step plan for getting online through either dial-up connection or other means if the Internet were to go down. These instructions were incorporated onto a website Haridy and other cyberactivists created for Vox Palestine to disseminate information to Gazans during the war. “They helped us a lot,” Haridy said in an interview. “Without Anonymous we would not have reached the surface.” Efforts to reach Anonymous were unsuccessful.
