Why Did Syria Shut Down the Internet? Posted

The World Wide Web became a little less worldwide on Tuesday afternoon. Suddenly, Syria disappeared, at least from the perspectives of Google and Akamai. Nineteen hours later, it appears to have come back on. How was it turned off? Four fibre-optic lines carry Internet traffic in and out of the country. Perhaps, as the government says, the rebels cut them all. Or perhaps four scavengers simultaneously digging for copper wrenched their spades in at the same time. But most likely, President Bashar al-Assad did the deed. The government also flipped the kill switch last fall, and security firms report that the shutdown comes from sophisticated engineering, not coördinated slicing or accidental shovelling.

The Internet has become a battlefield in every modern conflict. Russia and Georgia fought a cyber war as well as a real one. Last year, in Gaza, Israel warned its citizens that location data in their tweets could help Hamas target rockets. The Internet is a great place for information and for propaganda; it stores our secrets and supports our power grids. The distinction between a war with guns and a war with bits is blurring.

Throughout the conflict in Syria, rebels have used YouTube to foment outrage and to tell their stories. A sentence can tell you that blood flows in the streets, but a handheld camera can show it. Hactivists everywhere have rallied to the cause. Anonymous, the Internet’s freelance militia, has started a campaign aimed at Assad. An enterprising British blogger, with a name picked from a Frank Zappa song, has proved adept at figuring out the shape of Syrian arms trafficking through close analysis of YouTube. The government in Damascus meanwhile has sent out malware and published its own videos. The so-called Syrian Electronic Army spun the U.S. stock market into a panic by hacking into the Twitter account of the Associated Press and proclaiming that Barack Obama had been injured in an attack on the White House. More recently, hackers broke into the Twitter feed of The Onion, and posted layered, and admittedly clever, tweets like “UN retracts report of Syrian chemical weapon use: Lab tests confirm it is Jihadi body odor.” In an interview with the New York Times, one hacker explained that the assault was retaliation for an Onion article, supposedly written by Assad, titled “Hi, In The Past 2 Years, You Have Allowed Me To Kill 70,000 People,” which “hurt the feelings of many Syrians who relied on [the Onion] to tell the truth in a funny way.”

One would like to think that shutting off the Web is one of the final movements of a dying government, the frenetic thrashing of a wildebeest before a lion sinks its teeth in. It is a last resort of panic and fear—the people are screaming, the people hate us, let’s quiet the people down—and it’s self-destructive. It’s terrible for business, creates chaos, and enrages the world. Hosni Mubarak cut the Internet off in Egypt two weeks before fleeing. Qadaffi had no better luck. The Burmese junta struck during a moment of heated protest in 2007; since then, the politics of their country have been transformed.

But there are counterexamples. Iran has both cut off the Internet at points and tried to create its own “clean” version of the Web. Its government continues to thrive. China has raised its great firewall for years; in 2009 it shut off all access in Xinjiang province. The Internet has helped to open up that country in recent years, as Evan Osnos has written. But the government remains far more lion than wildebeest.

The battle over fibre-optic cables shows once again the paradox of the Internet. The technology is rooted in an effort to create a distributed system that could survive a nuclear war. In most places anyone can post or say anything. But the billions of Tweets and videos and stories all travel over a relatively small number of fibre-optic cables run by a relatively small number of companies. Last year, the security firm Renesys published a study on just how hard it would be to shut off the Internet in countries around the world. Sixty-one were at “severe risk,” meaning that they had only one or two companies at their frontiers. Iran was one of them.

Why did Assad act on Tuesday? Perhaps just from fear and a sense that the Internet is, overall, an aid for insurrection. Perhaps it was just a way to send a signal, or maybe it was more tactical. If the Internet gets shut down, rebels may try to access information in ways easier to track. It may be the equivalent of cutting the power to a house and then waiting to see where the flashlights go on. The fact that the Internet came back on a day later gives more credence to that idea. The most sinister possibility is that YouTube videos generally follow massacres. Perhaps the government was planning something that it wanted to keep from the Web.

The war in Syria has been fought in fog, even in this era of supposedly total information. As Dexter Filkins writes so powerfully in the magazine this week: we aren’t sure what’s happening and we don’t know what to do. Having one of the main sources of information shuttered—for a day now, and maybe again later—just leaves us even more in the dark.

Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Nicholas Thompson