Syria Drops Off the Internet As Turmoil Spikes

CWmike writes "In what appears to be the latest bid by a government to throttle access to news and information amid growing civil unrest, the Syrian government Friday shut down all Internet services. Internet monitoring firm Renesys reported that starting around 7 a.m. EDT today, close to two-thirds of all Syrian networks were suddenly unreachable from the global Internet. In just 30 minutes, routes to 40 of 59 Syrian networks were withdrawn from the global routing table, Reneys' chief technology officer James Cowie said in a blog post. The shutdown has affected all of SyriaTel's 3G mobile data networks as well as several of the country's ISPs, such as Sawa, INET and Runnet. Also down are the Damascus city government page and the customs web site. The only networks that appear to be somewhat reachable are a handful of government-owned networks such as one belonging to Syria's Oil Ministry, Cowie noted. 'We don't know yet how the outage was coordinated, or what specific regions or cities may be affected more than others,' Cowie wrote. 'If Egypt and Libya are any guide, one might conclude that events on the street in Syria are reaching a tipping point.'"

Comments

Protesters need a communications plan

[davidwr]

Part of any future protest movement is going to be managing international communication in the face of government-enforced information-blockades.

Part of any future totalitarian regime is going to be anticipating these and taking care of it.

--
On an unrelated topic, there are two ways to successfully run a totalitarian regime:
* Through fear and intimidation
* Through running it like a cult and silencing people at the slightest hint that they don't worship you.

Most regimes try use the first approach and some do so successfully. North Korea - the self-proclaimed 2nd happiest place on Earth - approximates the second but I'm sure they use the first when needed and they've been successful at staying in power for decades.

Re:Calling for bets

[rahvin112]

It's already bloody. Several thousand dead at this point. It looked like the Regime was winning until the pictures of the dead kids, in particular the one with the mutilated genitals hit the internet and basically fanned some new fire into the resistance. My guess is the regime is trying to prevent their own people from accessing the imagery of the kids, though it's likely that everyones already seen it or has copies. They made a serious error in judgement on the effect mutilating a child would have. My guess is they thought it would inspire fear, they were very very wrong.

Re:offtopic - 503's today

[elrous0]

Slashdot routes all its traffic through Syria.

But the internet routes around any censorship

[elrous0]

I get so sick of hearing people say that the internet can't be censored (usually with some "The internet is *designed* to route around any censorship" crap). If a government wants to stop you from posting pics of you beating kids on the old internets, they don't have to develop some elaborate firewall that you and your hacker buddies can figure out how to bypass. All they have to do is show up at the handful of ISP's in the country with rifles and tell them to cut you off. No connection to your house, no internet for you.

Re:But the internet routes around any censorship

[grcumb]

I get so sick of hearing people say that the internet can't be censored (usually with some "The internet is *designed* to route around any censorship" crap).

The Internet is designed to route around censorship. It's the physical networks that have choke points.

And no. this is not a distinction without a difference. As long as there are multiple routes to a destination, TCP/IP manages very well indeed, and allows the opportunity for all kinds of hard-to-track activity. But the vast majority of physical networks are built in the traditional telco format: Small pipes aggregating to big ones that pass through a single gateway, which is typically where the telco installs its toll booth and the government its censor. This topology is really the opposite of an end-to-end network, which is typically how we define the Internet.

The Internet is useful for two important things during an insurrection: To win the sympathy of the outside world, and to coordinate action. Ad hoc mesh networks would address the latter moderately well[*] (in urban areas) and smuggling high density media would work for the former. There is hope for the Internet yet, but it's not going to be realised as long as we leave it in the hands of telcos and governments.

--------------
[*] Of course, I'm not talking about typical North American consumer Internet. I'm talking about having any ability to communicate at all in the face of overwhelming censorship..

Re:Calling for bets

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Not only do they already have these images - Today was "Children's Friday" demonstration - where kids marched in the streets, carrying placards with the images of Hamza Al-Katib.
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/06/20116392427645443.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/syria-internet-services-shut-down-as-protesters-fill-streets/2011/06/03/AGtLwxHH_blog.html

Re:Calling for bets

[jollyreaper]

They made a serious error in judgement on the effect mutilating a child would have. My guess is they thought it would inspire fear, they were very very wrong.

Psychology is a funny thing. That kind of terror repression scares people into submitting right up to the point it scares them into rebelling. I think it works on a base, emotional level that defies any kind of rational consideration. It's like when the reporter is talking to someone who just did something crazy to save someone else, they'll say "I don't know why I did it, I wasn't thinking at all. I just saw and did and was through it before my mind caught up."

The Libya thing surprises me. I thought we saw the collapse of Qdaffy coming and it just stopped in mid-collapse. It's like watching a failed demolition where the building defiantly stops collapsing halfway through.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwGE92upfQM

I bet a lot of the high-level people who defected thought they were safely jumping on the bandwagon and now it's months later and where's this revolution we've been hearing about?

Re:Calling for bets

[gtall]

Insightful comment you made. Just to hopefully add a bit, I think the success of a revolution depends upon the proportion and status (in a very ill-defined sense) of the people the regime has bought off to the point where they depend upon the regime for survival (pick yer survival: religious, political, economic, etc.).

In Syria, the minorities have a stake in the government because the overwhelming majority of the people are Sunni whereas the regime is Alawite which a branch of Shi'ism. The Christians and other religious sects and the Kurds and other ethnic groups believe the government protects them from Sunni domination. Saudi Arabia's emphasis on Sunnism make the division sharper, just as they f-cked up the situation in Bahrain (there was no hint of Iranian involvement but those Saudi saw an Iranian behind every grain of sand). So the Syrian regime gets support it doesn't deserve, they cannot protect their minorities except through violence which will only make the Sunnis think of the minorities as ill-deserving of protection.

In Libya, the sects aren't a problem, it's the tribes. The Q. Dolt has been playing them off each other for decades. That kind of suspicion won't disappear overnight. Nor do the tribes feel any sort of common purpose, the tribe comes first. So the opposition has been diffuse. And the oil revenue has be paying for a certain segment of the population. That segment won't willingly give up.

The militaries in both countries depend intellectually and financially on the central government with no outside influence. With Egypt and Tunisia, there was Western influence. The consequence was the latter could see an existence separate professionally from the State. Syria and Libya's militaries can see no existence separate from the state because the State is their sole reason to exist.

Re:Calling for bets

[Smauler]

I'm personally very wary about individual cases inciting revolt.

Firstly, the revolutionaries in Libya have already committed acts of questionable legality and morality. Individual cases there have been worrying.
Secondly, individual incidents can often be blamed upon rogue individuals.
Thirdly, though I do not claim this has happened here, it is possible to stage individual events. Propaganda is massively effective.

However, the biggest problem I have with individual events that hit the news is that there are thousands that don't, that we are ignoring. Torture, violence, unjustified incarceration and repression are systematic in plenty of countries that we call our allies. Until recently we were happy to accept all these things with Syria (as one of a number of examples). It's only now that Syria is in crisis that we condemn their actions.

Lesson for dictators everywhere

[Spy Handler]

If you are a dictator, reasonably smart and been paying attention to current events, the following points should be occuring to you:

1. Be like Mike... er, I mean China.... be proactive about the interwebs. Put in a nationwide firewall, slowly censor the net so that stuff like twitter, facebook, gmail, etc. are not accessible to most of the normal population (i.e. non-geeks). This helps you avoid having to shut off the whole thing off later when the riots in the street reach epic levels.

Encouraging domestic, tightly-regulated and spied upon alternative companies, like China's Baidu and Renren, to substitute for the blocked USAsian sites is a bonus.

2. Never relinquish power, and be ruthless. Your only other option is imprisonment or death.

Nice guys like Mubarak who voluntarily give up power and refuse to annihilate protesters with cluster bombs end up getting arrested for (insert reason here). Kadaffi seems to have learned this lesson well.

3. Get nukes, and get them fast. If you don't, you can be bombed, invaded and arrested by USA/NATO at their whim. North Koreans and Iranians know this. Saddam didn't, and look what happened to him. Kadaffi is finding out right now the hard way.

This last one is a shame, and wouldn't be necessary if our leaders took to heart the founding fathers' plea about avoiding entangling alliances, not getting involved in the territorial disputes of Europe (and by extension the Middle East which is like 18th century Europe squared), be a friend of liberty everywhere but guardians only of our own. But noooo, Dubya had to avenge his father's wimpy mistake and prove to the world his dick size, and Obama had to... well I have no idea what motivates him but he is diving headlong into the Mideast and proving himself a clone of Dubya.

Re:Calling for bets

[Kyusaku Natsume]

Also, the fact that the libyan rebels are killing left and right black people just for the crime of being black has planted the seed for a long lasting conflict not only among libyans but between the libyans and their neighbors that are not that happy with the establishment of a new apartheid regime in North Africa.

Re:Calling for bets

[shutdown -r now]

The reason why the Libyan uprising failed was because it wasn't exactly a people's revolution, where elites are swiped away. It is an uprising against one faction of the Libyan society against another faction - a civil war - and it cuts across the social strata. There are plenty of genuine Qaddafi supporters in Libya, and not just in the army - early on they've been telling us that everyone is deserting him and he only has foreign mercs to fight for him, but by now it's obvious that it's not true. So the whole thing in Libya will drag on until either side will gain the upper hand, and make no mistake - either way it'll be a massacre for the other sides. Rebels aren't really any better than loyalists in that regard - we've already seen summary executions, public torture and mutilation documented on their side as well (plenty of vids on YouTube if you care to look). Not exactly surprising, given that the rebel faction is an unstable alliance of liberals, monarchists and Islamists, and liberals don't exactly have the upper hand. Then there are Black Libyans, who are between the rock and the hard place - loyalists want to conscript them to fight, and rebels (the majority of which are strongly racist) shoot them on sight when captured, as "mercs". Truly a mess.