AnchorFree Opens Doors to Revolution

Just before the March of a Million protesters converged on Tahrir Square in Cairo on Feb. 1, word of a game-changing online software program spread like a secret handshake among renegade computer users.

The free program, developed in Mountain View, allowed government critics to access news and social media sites, including Facebook and Twitter, without fear of government eavesdropping. With the tools, a virtual army of marginalized men, women and children transformed itself into a force so strong that crooked President Hosni Mubarak had no choice but to abandon the presidential palace for a Red Sea resort.

Hotspot Shield, which assigns users an anonymous American IP address, had become a conduit between closed societies and the free and open World Wide Web. Essentially giving individuals the kind of virtual private network (VPN) that companies have relied on for years to protect their data as it traveled across public networks, the download-able program protected communications from snoopy government packet sniffers that are used to spy on Internet traffic in many countries.

It helped provide a perfect storm of technology, allowing modern revolutionaries to access a toolkit that included Facebook Events (to invite people to rallies), Twitter (for military-style logistical communication) and YouTube (to disseminate moving images that influenced public opinion).

As the wave of revolution surged eastward, the numbers of Shield users spiked.

At the Tunisian unrest’s apex in December, 175,000 people used the program each day. Next came Egypt, where roughly 120,000 people deployed the Shield to access the Internet on Jan. 1. Before the month had ended, more than a million Egyptians were using the Shield to protect their identities as they plotted their moves.

By the time Mubarak hit the kill switch on the country’s Internet on Jan. 28, it was too late. The imperative for change had echoed beyond the Twittersphere and into the street. The Arab Spring was on its way.

The company behind the Hotspot Shield, AnchorFree, was created by 29-year-old co-founders David Gorodyansky and Eugene Malobrodsky, who have been friends since childhood. Wanting to give web surfers secure Internet connections, as well as protect user identities when logging on with passwords or other sensitive information, Hotspot Shield filled an untapped market. Since that time, the program has shown that idealism and making money are not mutually exclusive.

Libya also saw numbers trend sharply upward, from 6,400 people as of Feb. 1 to more than 42,000 by the end of the month. Actions by Col. Muammar Gaddafi’s forces to shut down the Internet throughout the region have since stifled AnchorFree’s progress, but not completely.

One feature of Hotspot Shield is that it allows AnchorFree to monitor traffic patterns. “We can see at night that the Libyan government is shutting down the Internet during the day by looking at our traffic,” Gorodyansky says. “We know in the Middle East when people are eating, when people are praying and when people are sleeping. We have a complete overview of what’s happening in different parts of the world at any time.”

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