Libyan Rebels Reboot Cellphone Service After Gadhafi's Shutdown

Libyan rebels who'd resorted to waving flags to communicate after Moammar Gadhafi cut off the Internet have now rebooted a local cellphone network for their own use.

The new network, rigged up with help from U.S.-trained Arab engineers, is giving many Libyans their first chance in a month to contact loved ones and see if they're dead or alive. The Libyan dictator shut down all Internet service and mobile phone links to the rebel-held east more than a month ago. And as chaos and fighting spread, outages have hit huge swaths of the whole country as well.

Now tech-savvy rebels have managed to pirate part of the Libyana cellphone network -- a government entity that's owned and operated by the Tripoli-based Libyan General Telecommunications Authority and run by Gadhafi's eldest son, Mohamed. The rebels split off a branch of it to use as their own independent network. So it's Gadhafi's very own signal system that's being used to transmit messages among his opponents.

The plan was masterminded by a 31-year-old Libyan engineer who grew up in Alabama and now lives in Abu Dhabi. Along with two childhood friends, Ousama Abushagur organized humanitarian aid convoys into eastern Libya after the fighting broke out there. But while they were delivering supplies, they realized their cellphone and even satellite signals were jammed, making it difficult to organize logistics.

So Abushagur hatched a complex plan, first scribbled on an airplane napkin early last month, to pirate Libyana's signal and carve out a network for the rebels to use for themselves. The plot was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Abushagur's two friends, both corporate managers, were living at the time in Dubai and Doha, the capital of Qatar. The governments of the United Arab Emirates and Qatar gave them diplomatic support and helped buy several million dollars of telecommunications equipment needed for Abushagur's plan, the Journal quoted rebels as saying. Those governments haven't confirmed their involvement publicly.

The new service, dubbed "Free Libyana," debuted in eastern Libya on April 2, changing the way rebel forces there communicate with one another, with their commanders hundreds of miles away and with the outside world. After Gadhafi shut off the Internet on March 3, most rebel messages were relayed via AM and FM transmissions, which were also monitored by government forces. On the battlefield, they were forced to resort to bullhorns, loudspeakers and even waving flags.

"Gadhafi forced us back to the stone age," Gen. Ahmed al-Ghatrani, a rebel commander in Benghazi, told the Journal. "We went to fight with flags: Yellow meant retreat, green meant advance."

At first, Libyan agents listened in on telephone calls in the country's rebel-held east, spying for any anti-government jabber. Then they decided to simply shut off the phone service altogether.

"You always had a bad feeling, that they could be listening to any call," Khalid Jabbala, a transmission engineer in Benghazi, told The Globe and Mail newspaper. "Now you can say whatever you want. We can't believe it."

Shutting off the Internet is a tactic long used by authoritarian regimes to stifle dissent. Ex-President Hosni Mubarak shut off Egypt's Internet and cellphone networks during a popular uprising there in February, but protesters dragged out 56K modems that run on landlines, and other creative makeshift patches, to continue communicating with one another. Mubarak and his sons are now in Egyptian detention, awaiting questioning for alleged corruption and abuse of authority.