Rulers and governments across the Arab world utilized the law, technology, and violence to control what was being posted on and disseminated through the Internet.
In Egypt, Libya, and Syria, the populations witnessed full Internet shutdowns as their respective governments attempted to quell protests.
In Tunisia, the government of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali hacked into and stole passwords from citizens' Facebook accounts.
While access to domestic Internet was still available this too suffered as a result of the shutdown as Egyptian networks were heavily dependent upon systems based outside of the country such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.
Jim Cowie, the chief technology officer of Renesys, remarked, "With the scope of their shutdown and the size of their online population, it is an unprecedented event".
[7] American company Narus, a subsidiary of Boeing Corporation, sold the Mubarak government surveillance equipment that helped identify dissidents.
[9] Some have argued that the shutdown's impact was therefore counter to the government's intention as many left their homes to acquire information and subsequently joined the protests.
It has been debated whether the government surgically tampered with the software that facilitates communication between Internet networks or whether they simply cut off the power to the routers.
[10] On 2 February 2011, BBC reported that Facebook and Twitter were once again available online and that the four major Internet Service Providers in Egypt were back up and running.
[13] In mid-February 2011 the Muammar Gaddafi government severed Internet access and international phone calls in eastern Libya in response to violent protests.
News was able to be leaked through rare Internet satellite connections which made possible intermittent Skype calls, MSN chats, and mobile video uploads.
Arbor Networks, based in the U.S., reported that all Internet traffic coming in and out of Libya had ceased starting at about noon on Thursday, 3 March.
Instead of simply shutting down Internet servers, the online routes remained open but traffic was "blackholed" before it could enter Libyan cyberspace.
Jim Cowie, the chief technology officer of the Internet intelligence firm Renesys, stated "The outages have lasted hours, and then service has resumed.
However, as noted by Jillian York, coordinator of the OpenNet Initiative, the few Libyans that did have Internet access were educated and politically aware and therefore more influential.
[19] Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy and Technology, noted that the Internet shutdown would make it more difficult for Libyans, especially those in the capital Tripoli, to receive updates about the state of the protests around the country.
[20] Though the Libyan government owns the nation's two mobile telephone providers, cell phone service appeared to be largely unaffected.
In May 2011, Syrian activists noticed that the telecommunications ministry was tapping into Facebook activity – passwords and private messages were suspected to have been stolen and read.
The self-proclaimed "Syrian Electronic Army," a pro-government group, has been accused of using the Internet to attack its opposition since early on in the uprising.
[27] Helmi Norman of the Munk School of Global Affairs in Toronto, Canada, pointed out that, "The Syrian Computer Society was headed by al-Assad himself in the 1990s before he became president."
While the government under Ben Ali sought to spread Internet access across the country, censorship of web content was extensive.
Some journalists have been prosecuted for offending the President through online material, disturbing order, or publishing what the government considered to be false news.
[36] After intense investigation, Sullivan and his team discovered that the government was running a malicious piece of code that recorded password on websites such as Facebook.
In response to the problem the team implemented two technical solutions, one of which involved users being asked to identify photos of friends when logging in.
[40] On March 2, one of the main organizers of the "Day of Rage," Faisal Ahmed Abdul-Ahadwas, was alleged to have been killed by Saudi security forces.