
Syrian Internet Is Off The Air - charliesome
http://www.renesys.com/blog/2012/11/syria-off-the-air.shtml
======
bitcartel
Maybe time to name and shame? In the following news, the name of the country
has been replaced with Syria. Can you guess the country? Bonus points if you
know the year.

[1] "For hundreds of thousands of Syrians, getting to work, school or the
market has been virtually impossible since Syria’s latest anti-terror campaign
began. Now, they won’t be able to get online, either." "The Syrian army
stormed the office building where six employees were believed to be staying in
order to maintain Internet service during this difficult time" "Explosions
were heard and the fate of the six employees is unknown."

[2] "Syria cuts off internet access. Most of the major internet service
providers in Syria are offline following week-long protests. Syria appears to
have cut off almost all access to the internet from inside and outside the
country from late on Thursday night" "Every Syrian provider, every business,
bank, internet cafe, website, school, embassy and government office that
relied on the big four Syrians ISPs for their internet connectivity is now cut
off from the rest of the world."

[3] "What Internet? Syria region cut off 6 months." "20 million people without
links to the outside world since the government blocked virtually online
access, text messages and international phone calls after ethnic riots in
July. It's the largest and longest such blackout in the world, observers say."
"Residents are without Internet links unless they flee to farflung places...
One customer had traveled 750 miles just to get online." "Region now has no
e-mail. No blogs. No instant messaging. The government this month promised
Internet access would resume "gradually," but it also said the same thing in
July and not much has changed. So far, only four restricted Web sites, half of
them state-run media, have returned."

Answers (link shortened so no cheating!) [1] <http://goo.gl/IpcrA> [2]
<http://goo.gl/WewSI> [3] <http://goo.gl/BaFli>

~~~
nir
Is there a point to this? Since the situation is vastly different in all the
three places you mention, isn't this just empty relativism?

~~~
bitcartel
I think this is an useful exercise. I wasn't actually aware of [1] and [3]
until I decided to find examples to post.

~~~
nir
So, what did you learn from doing that exercise? Did your perception of that
issue improve or just get diluted?

~~~
bitcartel
A couple of things come to mind.

\- It's easy to condemn a country for cutting off the internet, but can it be
justified under certain situations?

\- The UN Human Rights Council deemed that basic internet access is a human
right, but is it a fundamental human right which should never be taken away?

\- What if we're isolated from the outside world but can still access local
email, banking, websites, etc. to carry on our daily lives. Does that count as
being cut off from the internet and having a human right violated?

\- The sheer scale of shutdown is surprising - not just a few days, but for
months on end. How long could we last without access to the internet and how
far would we travel to get it?

~~~
saraid216
> \- The UN Human Rights Council deemed that basic internet access is a human
> right, but is it a fundamental human right which should never be taken away?

I think it can be qualified. The notion that free speech, which I think we can
mostly agree is an equal if not more fundamental human right, can be qualified
with things like "fighting words" or "clear and present danger" suggests that
other rights can similarly have exceptions.

I don't know what those are, and I have a hard time accepting that our
historical examples are a good indicator, so.

~~~
jahmed
You do retain the ability of saying "Fighting words" or words that create a
"clear and present danger" with the threat of punishment if used improperly.
The critical principle of free speech is that it is free from prior restraint.
You cant (or shouldnt) stop someone from saying something even if it is
something they can be punished for.

Cutting off access to the internet is like wholesale confiscation of printing
presses without regard to their actual use.

------
jeromeflipo
No outage reported by Google so far:
[http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/traffic/?r=SY&l...](http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/traffic/?r=SY&l=EVERYTHING&csd=1351969386206&ced=1354046400000)

~~~
level09
is this a realtime graph though ? many friends tried to call/connect with
people from Syria but they failed.

~~~
sjbach
The data is fairly close to realtime, with caveats. The time series chart
widget is a little dodgy, though, so it's sometimes difficult to see things on
the margin. We're working on putting something better in place.

------
flexd
The article says they lost the connection, and also that it was restored a few
hours later as far as I can see. I might be wrong but the title makes this out
to be something they did on purpose, permanently. Which does not seem the
case.

~~~
Baughnie
Pay attention to the dates.

There was a temporary outage on Nov. 27, which was restored after two hours.
We don't yet know what's happening today.

~~~
mikey77
No, it says those were part of 'a sequence of recent events'. This latest
outage 'continues' that.

~~~
shaaaaawn
Any idea what the cause is yet?

~~~
mason55
Appears to be fighting between the rebels and govt troops on the main road
near the airport in Damascus

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/29/us-syria-crisis-
id...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/29/us-syria-crisis-
idUSBRE8AJ1FK20121129)

------
ChuckMcM
Did anyone else note the similarity with Vernor Vinge's excellent fiction 'A
Fire Upon the Deep' and that headline? I guess it is going to be one of the
metrics of civil war state if the country's Internet connectivity begins to
fluctuate.

~~~
lnanek2
Haha, yes, I've read that and noticed.

Wonder if we'll ever have internet connectivity checked like we used to have
nuclear weapon inspections.

------
alx
[https://twitter.com/akamai_soti/status/274163048263057408/ph...](https://twitter.com/akamai_soti/status/274163048263057408/photo/1)
Akamai traffic for Syria

~~~
aw3c2
I wish that graph was extending over more than a day. At first glance I
thought "Oh, something sure was making the people use the internet before it
was shut down" but then I realised it was just a normal work day curve
starting in the night.

------
pav3l
[http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2019784835_apmlsyri...](http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2019784835_apmlsyria.html)

------
btilly
During the Arab Spring, several countries blocked the entire Internet.

As the example of Egypt illustrates, this was usually a bad mood for the
regime.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
For anyone else confused, I think btilly meant _move_ not _mood_.

~~~
pyre
I'm sure that the regime was in a bad mood when they were ousted...

------
charonn0
If history serves as an example, the Syrian government is desperate and on the
verge of collapse.

~~~
nandemo
Or planning a massacre?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hama_massacre>

------
rdl
This would be a fun time to have VSAT IP network bandwidth available over
Syria -- there's probably a lot of space capacity since the US pulled out of
Iraq (the US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan were basically the best thing
to happen to the satellite networking industry ever).

You can pretty easily get a $1k earth station which can fit in the back of
your car and set up in 30 minutes by someone with an 8th grade education and
~4h of training.

~~~
wnight
How easily can it be tracked with standard bunny-hunting? I imagine the
government would locate this pretty quickly and just mortar the neighborhood
to remove it.

~~~
rdl
Depends on the adversary.

1) It's a really tight beam. It's gotta to up to geostationary orbit on a
0.5-2W transmitter. Commercial stuff isn't always spread spectrum, though, so
it would be easier to go after than some of the better military satcom
equipment. OTOH, you can get spread spectrum commercial systems, so if you
were specifically setting up the Free Syrian Satcom Network, you'd go for
that.

The attacks are basically to hear about it/know about it from human
intelligence, then go after that. Or, to drive around and look for the
satellite dishes with lots of electronics (relative to TVRO dishes) on the
end, and hit those places.

You can go after intermediate frequencies (some of the modems are quite noisy;
it's generally L-band on the cable up to the dish), from the ground, by
driving around, but that's a low power signal, too.

The normal way is to have the cooperation of the satellite operator, with a
spectrum analyzer hooked up at the hub or somewhere (with an IP interface) and
then figure out location with tricks from there. (and, you basically "for
free" get a pretty thin circle on the earth based on just timing from the
satellite; it's unlikely such a circle covers that many rebel cities, so you
just concentrate the search there). It's relatively difficult to find a
misbehaving (or correctly behaving and unwanted) satellite transmitter WITHOUT
the cooperation of the satellite or network operator. I'm fairly confident
most of the satellite operators (Gulf Arab states, Europeans, some Asians, and
the US) wouldn't cooperate with Assad now. Maybe the Russians would, but just
don't use a Russian satellite for this, and pick an orbital position which
doesn't have a nearby Russian commercial satellite (I don't think a 1.5 degree
away satellite is that helpful for DFing a transmitter on another satellite,
but conceivably it would be; if you picked the right position you could force
the Russians to use aircraft or military satellites if they wanted to help
Syria, which is less deniable)

The US, UK, RU, JP, etc. have SIGINT/ELINT aircraft equivalent to RIVET JOINT
(and probably UAVs, now) to do this kind of thing from overhead, but I'm
pretty confident Syria doesn't anymore. If they did, they would be extremely
high value targets to hit, although likely operated/staffed by the vendor
nation (i.e. Russia) personnel, so hitting them might be politically
undesirable.

I am pretty sure the sigint/elint capabilities of Syria are focused on FRS,
other HT type systems, military radio (i.e. old Soviet anti-US DFing gear),
and IP systems (which is really easy when they own the network, although
probably harder since I doubt Narus/Boeing ever sold to them, at least
directly -- EFF says Blue Coat is the main vendor found, for which someone
should be tarred and feathered at the very least). Maybe some over-the-air
cellphone attack systems, but mostly they would just rely on the cooperation
of the network operator (i.e. themselves), although maybe they want to deal
with people using Turkish, Israeli, Jordanian, or Iraqi cell systems in border
regions. Basically the kind of gear you can buy for $50-100k. Not the kind of
equipment which comes with a free aircraft. (I'm not as familiar with the
equipment non-US countries can easily buy for this kind of thing as I should
be -- there's stuff like the Shoghi, but it basically falls into the big
emitter locators (Designed for finding radars and stuff like that) vs. more
intelligence/law enforcement (99% focused on satcom and on L-band portable sat
phones).)

2) Even if they could locate your transmitter, you can easily remote the
satellite from everything else. I would love to have a $1k satellite system
~500m away which somehow starts to attract enemy aircraft and/or ground
assault (either direct or bringing in the light artillery they have left). I'd
prepare the likely routes of attack and win all day. The Assad regime and the
enemy are on a lot more equal footing now than they were even ~2mo ago, so
being able to kill some helicopters at minimal risk to your own forces would
be great. You wouldn't even need MANPADs to do it; put a 23mm in the approach
path.

------
cypherpunks01
What are the best blogs/pages to watch for internet network news like this?

------
hmexx
Try restarting the router

~~~
lnanek2
Try restarting the government

------
paraschopra
Google confirms the sad news!
<http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/traffic/>

------
garazy
How relatively easy is this to do for governments? Are there systems in place
in other countries which makes this extremely complex/impossible to do?

~~~
gizmo686
Check out the CloudFare article for a clearer description
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4850035>

The general principle is that all of Syria's traffic travels through 4
physical cables. Given this, it is relatively simple to disable all of the
edge routers, so their is no path into or out of the country. Other countries
may not be able to do this nearly as easily, because of having more
redundancy, with some edges safe from the government.

------
alicesa
Shape of things to come :(

------
EGreg
Here comes Anonymous lol

------
mirzmaster
A communications disruption can mean only one thing -- invasion.

------
shaaaaawn
Skrillex can't even drop it this hard

------
benjlang
Anonymous, now's the time for you guys to attack Syrian government properties
online.

~~~
dsl
You mean the ones not connected to the internet anymore?

