Posts tagged syria
Syria Goes Dark
Via the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
According to Dan Hubbard of Umbrella Security Labs: “At around 18:45 UTC OpenDNS resolvers saw a significant drop in traffic from Syria. On closer inspection it seems Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet.” Hubbart notes that the two top-level domain servers for Syria (ns1.tld.sy and ns2.tld.s) were unreachable earlier today. Matthew Prince at Cloudflare published a video demonstrating just how the routes into and out of Syria’s Internet were withdrawn.
This is not the first time Syria has suffered an Internet shut down. In November 2012, Syria suffered a severe Internet black out. And as the violence in the region has escalated, we’ve documented campaigns of targeted malware attacks against Syrian activists…
…Yet during this time the Internet has largely remained available. While heavily censored, monitored, and compromised, the Internet has served as an important window connecting the world at large to Syria, and one way that international observers could connect with individuals on the ground in that country. A number of activists on the ground in Syria have access to Internet via satellite links, which can connect them to the Internet but carries a high risk for detection, which can be life threatening.
The Syrian government blames the blackout on “terrorists”, according to the BBC, but security experts and activists believe the regime shut down the Web to interfere with rebel communications, possibly in advance of an a major offensive.
Image: Google Transparency Report shows Syrian Internet blackout May 7, 2013, via the EFF.
Aleppo
Via the Times of Israel: This citizen journalism image provided by Aleppo Media Center AMC, which has been authenticated based on its contents and other AP reporting, shows people searching through the debris of destroyed buildings in the aftermath of a strike by Syrian government forces, in the neighborhood of Jabal Bedro, Aleppo, Syria, Tuesday Feb. 19, 2013 (photo credit: AP/Aleppo Media Center)
The Aleppo Media Center (English) is on Facebook.
Six Months
Today marks a half year since Austin Tice, a law student and former Marine infantry officer, disappeared in Syria. Austin is an independent journalist; he had used his summer break from studies to try his hand at photography and writing, and contributed to multiple news organizations during a period when very few journalists were inside Syria. No one has acknowledged detaining him. The video showing him in the custody of armed men raises many more questions than answers. His family awaits word, as do the families of other journalists missing in Syria’s civil war, including the family of James Foley. The @FreeAustinTice twitter feed has been revived. Please follow it, and raise your voice to release all the unlawfully detained men and women in Syria, including our friends.
By an Employee of the New York Times in Damascus Syria and Anne Barnard
Sunday Times to Freelancers: We Don't Want Your Syria Stories
England’s Sunday Times is no longer accepting freelancers’ work from Syria, saying that to do so puts reporters at risk.
Via the Press Gazette:
After submitting pictures from Aleppo this week [freelance photographer] Rick Findler was told by the foreign desk that “it looks like you have done some exceptional work” but “we have a policy of not taking copy from Syria as we believe the dangers of operating there are too great”.
Findler, 28, has been published before in The Sunday Times and has been to Iraq, twice, Libya and this is his third trip to Syria.
He said: “Surely it is that photographer’s decision to choose whether or not they take the risks.
“I thought part of photography was the fact that some people in this world do take exceptional risks to show the rest of the world what is happening.
“I just don’t know what else to do any more. I really feel disheartened and extremely let down.”
“This is not a financial decision. It is a moral one,” Graeme Paterson, the Sunday Times policy deputy foreign editor, told the Press Gazette, when asked to explain the decision. He added that the paper has staff reporters in the region.
“In the light of what happened to Marie Colvin we have decided we do not want to commission any journalists to cover the situation in Syria.
“And we take the same view regarding freelancers speccing in material. Even if they have returned home safely.
“This is because it could be seen as encouragement go out and take unnecessary risks in the future.
“The situation out there is incredibly risky. And we do not want to see any more bloodshed. There has been far too much already.”
Colvin, an American war correspondent working for the Sunday Times, and French photojournalist Remi Ochlik were killed last February in Homs by rockets fired by the Syrian government.
For Syria’s war is characterised most strongly by absence and collective abandonment. Other than the protagonists and victims the arena is almost empty. There is no foreign military intervention. There are no NGOs or aid workers distributing food and blankets. The media is similarly self-exiled: very few broadcasters or newspapers commit journalists regularly, if at all. A handful of freelance photographers work inside the country, but none of the big names. The middle-aged bravehearts of Bosnia and Afghanistan have grown old and too soft for the hardships of Syria, while the economics of journalism have not allowed their replacement generation to prosper. That McCullin, still a prizefighter despite his years, had hauled himself out to that lonely war zone was inspiring in itself, legitimising the work of the few freelancers already there and challenging the absentees.
Anthony Loyd, The Australian. Parting shots.
That’s right: a 77 year old photographer named Don McCullin recently went to Aleppo to take his last set of photos, 15 years after his last war assignment. See the above article for an account of his trip as told by the much younger journalist in charge of his safety.
There’s no telling which photos from Syria’s revolutionary war will become famous and come to represent the conflict, if any do at all. For a great collection of pictures by other photojournalists in the country, see these. For more of McCullin, who is something of a legend in his line of work, see this bio and a portion of his photography from Vietnam and Lebanon.
In recent months, a team of researchers part of Canada’s Citizen Lab have been conducting network scans of public servers in countries on almost every continent. Today, they released their findings—which appear to show that networking technology made by Blue Coat, a Silicon Valley-based company, is being used in a host of countries with questionable human rights records.
The equipment in question can serve a legitimate purpose—like filtering out spam or malware. But in the hands of an authoritarian regime it can easily be turned into a tool for monitoring users or blocking content. Citizen Lab says it found Blue Coat filtering technology capable of censorship operating in countries including Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. It also found Blue Coat technology that can be used for surveillance and tracking of Web users in Afghanistan, Bahrain, China, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Nigeria, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey, and Venezuela.
Ryan Gallagher, Slate. Report: Silicon Valley Internet Surveillance Gear Used by Authoritarian Regimes.
For more, see Citizen Lab, Blue Coat and the report itself. Bonus: a prior investigation on Blue Coat (via the article above.)
Syria Deeply, Beat Page of the Future
It’s an incredible idea: one site, one beat. No front page. No sports, no business or finance, anywhere. It’s called Syria Deeply.
It’s about 25% original content, written by veteran Middle East correspondent Lara Setrakian and friends. The rest is aggregated and includes interactives, maps, and contextual material aimed to catch people up on the story without pointing them off site.
From FastCompany:
From a taxonomy perspective, Syria Deeply is the opposite of most news sites. In a traditional news taxonomy, information is divided by broad topics, like World News. Each topic is divided into subsections, like the Middle East. Each subsection is then often divided into even smaller subsections, like Syria. Each section gets smaller and smaller. Topic pages live in obscure ghettos on many news websites: auto-aggregated and ugly dumping grounds for content that happens to be tagged with particular keywords.
On Syria Deeply (designed by Brock Petrie and developed by Soumyadeep Paul and Arindam Biswas, who runs Collective Zen) the topic page is the homepage. Setrakian’s hope is that this site-wide focus on a single beat will allow for deeper, more thoughtful reporting.
FJP: Looks extremely promising.
A little less than two years ago, when Internet access was cut off in Egypt, we worked with Twitter to launch Speak2Tweet, giving the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.
In the last day, Internet access has been completely cut off in Syria. Unfortunately we are hearing reports that mobile phones and landlines aren’t working properly either. But those who might be lucky enough to have a voice connection can still use Speak2Tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+90 212 339 1447 or +30 21 1 198 2716 or +39 06 62207294 or +1 650 419 4196), and the service will tweet the message. No Internet connection is required, and people can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet.
Syria Disappears from the Internet
Via AllThingsD:
A few hours ago, Syria, the Middle Eastern country in the middle of an especially bloody civil war, disappeared from the Internet.
The research firm Renesys, which keeps track of the status and health of the technical underpinnings of the Internet around the world, just reported that at 10:26 UTC this morning — which, by my watch, would have been 5:26 am ET — effectively all of Syria’s international Internet connectivity shut down…
…The Associated Press (via the Seattle Times) has a report citing Syrian activists saying that the government has cut off Internet and wireless phone connections in and around several neighborhoods of the capital city of Damascus. There have been some clashes there between government forces and the rebels.
Syria watchers are using the hashtag #SyriaBlackout on Twitter for updates and news.
Image: Akamai Traffic to Syria, via AllThingsD which reports that “all 84 blocks of IP addresses assigned to Syria have gone unreachable.”
A Small Group of Syrians
FJP: Syrian photographer Jaber Al Azmeh’s latest work takes the government’s newspaper to share the revolution’s thoughts. It’s quite astounding.
The project’s description, as found on Azmeh’s Facebook page:
A small group of Free Syrians offer their words…. This project takes on one of the Syrian Government’s most prominent symbols – The Ba’ath Newspaper – as part and parcel of the Baath Security State – and here turns it upside down to be a surface of new thoughts written by the Syrian people thus overturning the daily chronicle of government lies. We emphasize also that the comments are directed not particularly to the Ba’ath but rather to ‘The Regime’ itself. Each participant was invited to use the news paper or write some words to symbolize his or her thoughts within the general idea of the revolution. Those are Syrians; Here are their words. This project began from the earliest months of the revolution. It was a time when the camera was, and continues to be, one of the revolution’s most important weapons. It was also important to work in simple and easily accessible ways while remaining discreet and not attracting too much attention. Participating in this project gave birth to new friendships, as has the revolution itself, in bringing together diverse Syrian individuals and their talks of revolution and freedom with all the complex emotional mix they entail – ecstasy, sadness and determination – they proudly express their allegiance to the one homeland, Syria.
(H/T to kawrage for the original Tumblr post)
The Hackers of Damascus
Via Businessweek:
Taymour Karim didn’t crack under interrogation. His Syrian captors beat him with their fists, with their boots, with sticks, with chains, with the butts of their Kalashnikovs. They hit him so hard they broke two of his teeth and three of his ribs. They threatened to keep torturing him until he died. “I believed I would never see the sun again,” he recalls. But Karim, a 31-year-old doctor who had spent the previous months protesting against the government in Damascus, refused to give up the names of his friends.
It didn’t matter. His computer had already told all. “They knew everything about me,” he says. “The people I talked to, the plans, the dates, the stories of other people, every movement, every word I said through Skype. They even knew the password of my Skype account.” At one point during the interrogation, Karim was presented with a stack of more than 1,000 pages of printouts, data from his Skype chats and files his torturers had downloaded remotely using a malicious computer program to penetrate his hard drive. “My computer was arrested before me,” he says.
Much has been written about the rebellion in Syria: the protests, the massacres, the car bombs, the house-to-house fighting. Tens of thousands have been killed since the war began in early 2011. But the struggle for the future of the country has also unfolded in another arena—on a battleground of Facebook pages and YouTube accounts, of hacks and counterhacks. Just as rival armies vie for air superiority, the two sides of the Syrian civil war have spent much of the last year and a half locked in a struggle to dominate the Internet. Pro-government hackers have penetrated opposition websites and broken into the computers of Reuters and Al Jazeera to spread disinformation. On the other side, the hacktivist group Anonymous has infiltrated at least 12 Syrian government websites, including that of the Ministry of Defense, and released millions of stolen e-mails.
The Syrian conflict illustrates the extent to which the very tools that rebels in the Middle East have employed to organize and sustain their movements are now being used against them. It provides a glimpse of the future of warfare, in which computer viruses and hacking techniques can be as critical to weakening the enemy as bombs and bullets. Over the past three months, I made contact with and interviewed by phone and e-mail participants on both sides of the Syrian cyberwar. Their stories shed light on a largely hidden aspect of a conflict with no end in sight—and show how the Internet has become a weapon of war.
Stephan Feris, Businessweek. The Hackers of Damascus.
Polling Iranians and Syrian rebels
We more or less understand which candidate is favored in which state, and we know that Europe, to speak very generally, likes Obama, even if its with less enthusiasm this time. But the opinions of other, more worrisome regions are not always considered. Let’s take a look.
In the Universities of Iran, politics professors see little difference between the candidates, but quotes taken from Tehran’s street life strikingly resemble those of, umm, the East Village.
From WaPo:
Unlike the Iranian establishment, ordinary citizens say they see major differences between the two candidates. Among many, the belief seems to be that Iran could be attacked by the United States or Israel if Romney becomes president, while they see a greater possibility for a peaceful solution if Obama is re-elected.
“Most of my colleagues and I believe that Obama is better because he is moderate and wants peace, while the Republicans talk about war, which frightens us,” said Marjan, a 43-year-old high school teacher.
In Syria, where rebels struggle to fight a seemingly unending civil war, one rebel leader has voiced his support for Mitt Romney.
From the Guardian’s Middle East Live blog:
A senior rebel commander in Syria says he is backing Mitt Romney in today’s US presidential election because he is the candidate mostly likely to provide weapons to the rebels.
Interested elsewhere? See this Guardian article.
Photo: During a break from fighting, Syrian rebels dance in a house in Aleppo. Zain Karam/Reuters. See other incredible photos from the Syrian war here, posted today.
This honor is dedicated to the martyrs of the Syrian revolution, and to all those women who are working in silence, in particularly difficult circumstances inside Syria, and to those who move among the downpour of bullets and artillery fire, the tanks and the fighter jets, in order to carry on the revolution of the Syrian people toward establishing a free and democratic society.
Samar Yazbek, winner of the 2012 Pen Pinter International Writer of Courage prize, in her acceptance speech.
Yazbek’s memoir, A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution, was released earlier this year and chronicles the Syrian civil war. She currently lives in exile in Paris.
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