Government blocks New Vision, Daily Monitor websites ahead of election

A number of regular New Vision and Daily Monitor readers reported on the morning of February 20 that they could not get through to the two websites from any point in the world.

The two websites were temporarily blocked as the state intelligence engineers experimented with how they can be blocked on Election Day, Thursday February 23.

As we reported in January, plans to cut off the three mobile telephone networks of MTN, UTL, and Celtel have been finalized by the state. By 10:00 a.m. Ugandan time, the sites were back online.

Radio Katwe made the state realise that if they had to cut off the mobile phone networks, it would be useless without also blocking the public's access to the two main news websites on Uganda, New Vision and Daily Monitor.

Once in a while, one of the websites gets a technical problem. It is not common for both of them at exactly the same time to develop such problems and this suggests that the state was experimenting with blocking the two sites three days before the election.

The idea came from the state's blocking of Radio Katwe inside Uganda.

The timing was a clue to this. The two websites were blocked in the early morning hours of February 20 East African Time, just before most office-bound people arrived at work.

It is possible that the government will shut down the whole Internet system in Uganda, leaving millions of Ugandans in a total news and information blackout.