Slashdot Mirror
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 In just 30 minutes, routes to 40 of 59 Syrian networks were withdrawn from the global routing table, Reneys' chief technology officer James Cowie said in a blog post.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.'"
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.
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?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.