Internet blocking attempts to combat the phenomenon of matriculation exams leaks
On June 14th it was posted that several voices in the Egyptian Education Ministry called for disabling Web services an hour prior to the Thanaweya Amma exams which are conducted between June 5-28 and will determine for some 570 thousand high school students, their admission to various universities. This is to deal with the various leaks that have occurred recently in the Egyptian schools, which rapidly leaked the answers to the internet.
The ministry spokesman denied that the minister proposed a program of such to disable the internet and said that these were ideas that have been proposed to the Ministry. But this contradicts the statements of the minister to the Education Commission Parliamentary convened to discuss the issue, it said that the ministry “ordered that the web service will be suspended for one hour before and after exams, however, we were surprised to discover that this move would be ‘illegal’. So we proposed to disrupt the communication within schools for a certain period of time, but the cost was 150 million Egyptian pounds (17 million USD) “. Alongside the already existing ban on the entry of mobile phones to the exams’ halls, but it turns out that the ministry itself is aware that it is difficult to monitor it.
The Egyptian news website that reported the event tried to bridge the conflict and noted that he received no reply.
In the face of mounting pressure on the minister to take appropriate steps to arrest those responsible for the leaks, as well as demonstrations of dozens of students in front of his office calling for his resignation and revolution in the education system, said the minister to the committee that his office has taken a series of actions including: Monitoring 26 websites that threatened to leak the exams, search among more than 80 thousand employees of the ministry before the start of the exams, the arrest of 12 employees of the ministry in early June in connection with the leak of the exam in religion subjects and probably also in English.
These answers were leaked and posted on a Facebook page named Chao Ming Cheats, who for four years has published the answers during the exams, but it seems that this year for the first time this page have placed copies of the exams and answers before they began.
This phenomenon is not unique to Egypt, Uzbekistan shut down internet communications and text messages during the college entrance exams on August 1st, 2014, the internet was disabled from Iraq in June 29th, 2015 and mid-May 2016 and Algeria during June 2016.
