Syria shut off its Internet

[cosmicalstorm]

Sad to read this. Lets hope the rebels can work around this.
(I cant copy and paste from my phone)
http://paritynews.com/web-news/item/497 ... ernet-grid

[ryacko]

How much of Syria actually has electricity anyway?

Besides, they are just shutting off the major ISPs, one could get around this with dial-up.

[Sea Skimmer]

All phone service was also cut, only satellite phones that work independently of anything Assad controls can get messages out, and like any government of that size Syria has equipment that can trackdown the signals those emit, making use for more then short periods very risky.

This kind of blackout been done before, just not nationwide in one go, normally it has been one region or city. This is all certainly linked into the fact that the international airport at Damascus is under large scale rebel attack for the first time ever, and the government is launching some kind of large scale offensive against many of the rebel held suburbs between the airport and the downtown areas. Course about eight other offensives have failed to clean the rebels out of more then parts of those suburbs before. I doubt this is going to be any different given that Assad has only showed signs of weakening in the last six months.

Officially the Syrian government has claimed the complete and sudden communications failure was the work of terrorists blowing up the phone lines...

[Aaron MkII]

Amidst the ongoing civil war, Syria has gone off the Internet a few hours ago with all the 84 IP block within the country unreachable from the outside.
Renesys, a research firm, keeping tabs on the health of the Internet reported at about 5:25 ET that Syria’s Internet connectivity has been shut.  The internet traffic from outside to Syrian IP addresses is going undelivered and anything coming out from within the country is not reaching the Internet.

There have been no reports as to why the connectivity was shut but, it won’t be too farfetched to assume that this disconnection may be a way to control the information flow from Syria to the outside.

Akamai has reported that its traffic data supports what Renesys has observed. According to a tweet, the firm revealed that there was a sudden vertical drop in the traffic in terms of bandwidth. People have taken to twitter as the hashtag #SyriaBlackout brings out tons of search results about the Internet and cellular outage.


According to Seattle Times, Syrian activists have revealed that the government has not only cut off the Internet but, also wireless phone connections in and around the capital city of Damascus.

Google's transparency report is also showing similar stats with traffic from Syria for all its products just down to 'zero' all of a sudden.

There you go mate.

[ryacko]

Two technology firms that monitor global Internet traffic report that Syria has been cut off from the Internet. Regular landline phone and cell phones services have been affected as well, Syrian opposition activist Ammar Abdulhamid told me. “Therefore, the possibility of accidental damage can be discounted,” said Abdulhamid. “This is something done intentionally by the regime, and reflects growing desperation on account of the recent advances made by rebels, especially in Damascus.”

The communications blackout may signal that the 20-month-long uprising against Bashar al-Assad has moved to a new and even more violent stage, in what some are calling the battle for Damascus. “With Assad forces now conducting major operations in Damascus,” says Abdulhamid, “they will cover it up as much as possible and create their own version of the truth.”

Opposition activists and armed rebels have their own communications system, explains NOW Lebanon editor in chief Hanin Ghaddar. “They have satellite phone with internet connectivity, so they can download information, and send videos and messages. However, I’m seeing some concern among activists on Facebook that with the main comms system offline their separate systems might now be easier to detect and they might be easier to find.”

Ordinary Syrians in towns and villages, most of whom don’t have their own internet service, but rely on Internet cafes, are virtually cut off from the rest of the world. The worry, says Ghaddar, is “that cutting off the internet is an indication that the regime is planning something like a huge massacre." A recent YouTube video taken of Aleppo after an air attack shows much of the city in ruins and evidence of large-scale civilian casualties, which activists fear is merely a prelude of what is yet to come.

Assad’s desperation, said Abdulhamid, is a product of the rebels’ recent advances. “In the last two weeks, the regime has lost six air bases around Damascus and Aleppo,” Abdulhamid said. “The rebels might not be able to hold all those bases, but they’ve lifted arms from those bases, including the surface to air missiles with which they’ve brought down 9 aircraft in the last two days—5 MiGs, 4 helicopter gunships.”

In effect, the opposition has begun to carve out a small no-fly zone of its own. “The rebels,” says Abulhamid, “are quietly laying siege to Damascus.”

Opposition activists anticipate that battle for Damascus is about to begin. Assad forces have been recalled from the provinces, in order to protect regime holdings in the Syrian capital, including the presidential palace. Much of the fighting is reportedly taking place on the main road to the Damascus airport. Emirates airline has suspended flights into Damascus, and so has Egypt Air.

In the meantime, the Obama administration is contemplating taking stronger action against Assad. After sitting on the sidelines during the course of the uprising, in spite of American allies like Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and most recently British prime minister David Cameron urging the White House to take the lead, Obama has demurred.

“The administration has figured out that if they don’t start doing something, the war will be over and they won’t have any influence over the combat forces on the ground,” Jeffrey White of the Washington Institute told the New York Times. “They may have some influence with various political groups and factions, but they won’t have influence with the fighters, and the fighters will control the territory.”

If the battle for Damascus is indeed underway, the White House may have already forfeited its ability to shape a post-Assad Syria.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/blo ... 64191.html
This is a better article, mentions the existence of landlines.

[Surlethe]

This is a double-edged, desperate move. One the one hand, it inhibits large-scale rebel coordination. On the other hand, it signals to the general population that the regime believes rebels are engaging in large-scale coordination and pose a significant threat to the regime - a threat serious enough to warrant this nuclear option. This could spur marginal uprising participants to lend their support to the rebellion. As I recall, when Mubarak shut down the internet and the cellular networks in Egypt, the protests merely intensified.

[Sea Skimmer]

Mubarak was head of a much different regime, in a much different situation though. That's why he lasted 18 days, while Qaddafi lasted eight months and would have won the conventional war easily enough without NATO, while Assad and company could well easily last another year or more with at least part of the country under some level of control. His power base has some real diversity, and he heads an actual single party state (most mid eastern single parties are kind of jokes), the Baath Party of Syria is a tangible presence in the streets and has been since it took power ect... even now large areas of the country do support him and even if the bulk of the military won't fight, it wont defect or turn on him either. I don't think we've seen even close to desperate yet. That would be, very bad. Remember the siege of Hama in 1982 may have killed three quarters as many people in a month as have died in the 20 month civil war so far, and the population of Syria in 1982 was much smaller. Around a third as large I think. Even at best it killed a quarter as many, some 10,000 in a month, in one city. Allah willing something will suddenly undo the regime before the civil war can descend to desperate.

[Simon_Jester]

How would you characterize the weaknesses of the Mubarak regime?

[Sea Skimmer]

I was going to put this last, but I'll put it first instead for those who like short answers. In general Syria is somewhat comparable to the way the Axis power states worked in WW2, while Egypt and Libya were more like Banana republics. Mubarak was in the position of having been prompted to be spokesman of the junta, and thus the most obvious and expendable target. All the responsibility without all the power. You might almost make a really really bad comparison to him being like the secretary of state in the US, rather then the president. But every state is of course, its own unique creation.

For the long pointless since nothing is settled yet except that Qaddafi is rotting version, Mubarak was a puppet of the army with no proper independent basis of power, after all he only got into power by being an air force general and later member of Sadat's cabinet. Soon as the army saw him as a liability he was gone and nothing he could do about it. Nobody in the army owned him any real personal loyalty, nobody existed to tell the army what to do. He had the police under his control who were pretty inept, outnumbered and generally dysfunctional. Also one of the biggest sources of protester anger thanks to them doing crap in the past few years like raping people and then sending the cellphone video to family members. So Mubarak was easy to throw under the rug, while the army is actually still controlling Egypt in large part through its own power, its economic power and the courts and civil administration being full of army-Mubarak supporters. That's why the country is constantly in trouble. The revolution isn't finished yet.

With Qaddafi meanwhile, Qaddafi got into power via the military, but then gutted the military and replaced it with his personal militia, plus a single division of elite guard commanded by his own son, and generally did everything he could to ensure that no institutions of any kind existed in Libya except his direct personal pawns. That kind of approach will only really work in a small country, and actually left him with an outright shortage of people to order out to go kill protesters once the fear wall was breached, even when the rebels had almost no weapons themselves. That's why he had to turn to mercenaries so much, even before the war actually began.

Assad though, he has some major personal failings in not being the baddass his dad was, but the regime he sits on top of is very well organized, and nobody holds all the cards. You have a regular military, which includes elite regime units, you have a republican guard independent of that, you have seven or eight major secret police branches, some independent and linked to the party, some wings of the military services, all able to watch over each other and the civilian population. You have the Baath Party itself, which actually has card carrying members everywhere and actual buildings with at least in some parts of the country actual recreational facilities and air condition and stuff to get people in the door, involved and liking the party. You have his family, which is big, well connected with everything and not just made up of rich pretty boy kids, in fact some people think some of his older relatives (including ones reported dead in the past) are in fact calling many of the shots and in conflict with him. Plus you have the minimal/no compromise approach to Israel and telling the US to go to hell over Lebanon in the 1980s that helped cement the base legitimacy of the regime. You also had a more equitable spread of wealth in Syria, something like a middle class. This is not to say its an equitable country, but its vastly more so then Egypt or Syria. They don't have piles of oil wealth, which creates problems if not spent wisely, you don't have millions and millions of utter dirt poor people either. Some of these strengths have also created problems, like the single party state being very expensive to maintain and like always, having its fingers all over the economy leading to stagnation. The ethnic diversity of Syria is also strength and weakness at the same time. Hell one of Assads problems early on actually was people thought too highly of him and the regime, and thought, and said in countless videos on the net and interviews with the press, that it was actually capable of reform. And if life was great, it actually could have reformed, and hell, I bet Assad could have won a real election in 2011 too, but regimes like this don't work that way. They can't, its too much risk. So the regime used force as its first and only course of action, and only as the rebellion began growing did it attempt to begin bribing various groups to remain loyal and even made a few belated and half hearted reforms, but the snowball effect of death compounding death and misery, and of so many people remembering past offenses had already begun.

[cosmicalstorm]

That's a very interesting summary of Syria.

[Sephirius]

From Cloudflare:

How Syria Turned Off the Internet
November 29, 2012

Today, 29 November 2012, between 1026 and 1029 (UTC), all traffic from Syria to the rest of the Internet stopped. At CloudFlare, we witnessed the drop off. We've spent the morning studying the situation to understand what happened. The following graph shows the last several days of traffic coming to CloudFlare's network from Syria.

Since the beginning of today's outage, we have received no requests from Syrian IP space. That is a more complete blackout than we've seen when other countries have been cut from the Internet (see, for example, Egypt where while most traffic was cut off some requests still trickled out).

The graph above (sorry, couldnt link) shows two other incidents over the last week. On 25 November 2012 at approximately 0800 UTC we witnessed a 15 minute period during which Syrian traffic was cut to only 13% of normal levels. Again on 27 November 2012 at 0730 UTC, we saw a 15 minute period during which traffic dropped to only 0.2% of normal.

What Happened?

The Syrian Minister of Information is being reported as saying that the government did not disable the Internet, but instead the outage was caused by a cable being cut. Specifically: "It is not true that the state cut the Internet. The terrorists targeted the Internet lines, resulting in some regions being cut off." From our investigation, that appears unlikely to be the case.

To begin, all connectivity to Syria, not just some regions, has been cut. The exclusive provider of Internet access in Syria is the state-run Syrian Telecommunications Establishment. Their network AS number is AS29386. The following network providers typically provide connectivity from Syria to the rest of the Internet: PCCW and Turk Telekom as the primary providers with Telecom Italia and TATA for additional capacity. When the outage happened, the BGP routes to Syrian IP space were all simultaneously withdrawn from all of Syria's upstream providers. The effect of this is that networks were unable to route traffic to Syrian IP space, effectively cutting the country off the Internet.

Syria has 4 physical cables that connect it to the rest of the Internet. Three are undersea cables that land in the city of Tartous, Syria. The fourth is an over-land cable through Turkey. In order for a whole-country outage, all four of these cables would have had to been cut simultaneously. That is unlikely to have happened.

Watching the Shutdown Happen

One of our network engineers recorded the following video of network routes being withdrawn. Syrian Telecommunications (AS29386) is represented by the red dot in the middle of the video. The lines represent routes to the Syrian upstream providers.

Beginning at 1026 UTC, routes were withdrawn for PCCW. The routing shifted primarily to Turk Telekom. Routes to Telecom Italia and TATA were also withdrawn, but has less of an impact. Then, at 1029 UTC, routes were withdrawn for Turk Telekom. After that, Syria was effectively cut off from the Internet. (Note that the remaining path that appears to be present in the video is an anomaly. We have confirmed that it is not actually active.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=OZHKeYwnALc

While we cannot know for sure, our network team estimates that Syria likely has a small number of edge routers. All the edge routers are controlled by Syrian Telecommunications. The systematic way in which routes were withdrawn suggests that this was done through updates in router configurations, not through a physical failure or cable cut.

What Syrians Were Surfing Before the Internet Was Turned Off

The last four sites on CloudFlare that received requests from Syria in the seconds before access was cut were:

fotoobook.com - a photo sharing blog
aliqtisadi.com - a Syrian news site
madinah.com - a Muslim-oriented social network
to2.xxx - a porn site (warning: not safe for work)

In other words, traffic from Syrians accessing the Internet in the moments before they were cut off from the rest of the world looks remarkably similar to traffic from any part of the world.

As we have posted about recently, we don't believe our role is to take sides in political conflicts. However, we do believe it is our mission to build a better Internet where everyone can have a voice and access information. It is therefore deeply troubling to the CloudFlare team when we see an entire nation cut off from the ability to access and report information. Our thoughts are with the Syrian people and we hope connectivity, and peace, will be quickly restored.

Posted by Matthew Prince

note: the video linked above is in real time. shows how fast they brought the whole thing down.

[Flagg]

I'm less concerned with how and more concerned with why. I'm really wondering if they are doing this (and shutting down their airports) because they are going to start using Chemical Weapons and don't want outside eyes on it.

[KlavoHunter]

I'm less concerned with how and more concerned with why. I'm really wondering if they are doing this (and shutting down their airports) because they are going to start using Chemical Weapons and don't want outside eyes on it.

Assad's not going to start gassing people, he knows that if he starts doing that he'll be deader than Osama and Qaddafi after B-2s pay him a visit. Didn't Obama say that the use of bio/chem was a 'red-line' that Assad had damn well better not cross?

[Sea Skimmer]

Even with the west was no issue, they still wouldn't use chemical weapons now; in fact while the rebels keep capturing more stuff, they are also becoming very unpopular in some areas they occupy and showing signs of fragmenting badly just as they had begun to gain some unity. It doesn't make sense to throw that all out of the window, yet. Assad's best hope right now is that the rebels become dominated by the currently minority faction of islamists and that hardens up his own support base. If all the people Assad could arm would fight for him, he'd surely win. Problem is even in 1982 when the rebellion was nothing but islamists, even his fathers forces were of iffy loyality. But that's a reason why Syria worked so long, because of its diversity the family could always find another group willing to fight another.

Meanwhile, the rebels just don't present any tempting gas targets anyway, even cities which are under 'rebel control' generally have at least some districts that are still pro Assad. Even Saddam only gassed Halabja, which was more or less completely hostile, when it was also full of Iranian troops and the entire Iraqi northern front was on the verge of collapse, which would have seen the total defeat of Iraq. You really don't want to issue orders like this unless you think the men carrying them out also believe its life or death too. Otherwise imagine the result of a MiG with nerve gas bombs defecting to Turkey, or dropping them on the a government base.

Now, if Assad may be heading towards a lot more concentrated bombing and artillery use to actually completely destroy some rebel held districts, that's entirely possible, but I don't think this blackout is any specific sign of that. I think its just facing reality that the rebels are now so numerous that its vital to stop them from easily communicating and hiding during government sweeps around the capital. Doing this earlier was a bad idea since the civilian economy was still functioning in large part, now its starting to fall apart and that makes civilians having communications a lot less important. I'm skeptical this will last much longer anyway, just because it has to be making life hard even for Assad's own militia operations and government administration. If distribution of food and fuel breaks down for a protracted period, its game over in any country.

[Flagg]

NBCNews.com

Syria loads chemical weapons into bombs; military awaits Assad's order
By Jim Miklaszewski and M. Alex Johnson, NBC News

The Syrian military is prepared to use chemical weapons against its own people and is awaiting final orders from President Bashar Assad, U.S. officials told NBC News on Wednesday.

The military has loaded the precursor chemicals for sarin, a deadly nerve gas, into aerial bombs that could be dropped onto the Syrian people from dozens of fighter-bombers, the officials said.

As recently as Tuesday, officials had said there was as yet no evidence that the process of mixing the "precursor" chemicals had begun. But Wednesday, they said their worst fears had been confirmed: The nerve agents were locked and loaded inside the bombs.

Sarin is an extraordinarily lethal agent. Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's forces killed 5,000 Kurds with a single sarin attack on Halabja in 1988.

U.S. officials stressed that as of now, the sarin bombs hadn't been loaded onto planes and that Assad hadn't issued a final order to use them. But if he does, one of the officials said, "there's little the outside world can do to stop it."

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reiterated U.S. warnings to Assad not to use chemical weapons, saying he would be crossing "a red line" if he did so.

Speaking Wednesday at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Clinton said the Syrian government was on the brink of collapse, raising the prospect that "an increasingly desperate Assad regime" might turn to chemical weapons or that the banned weapons could fall into other hands.

"Ultimately, what we should be thinking about is a political transition in Syria and one that should start as soon as possible," Clinton said. "We believe their fall is inevitable. It is just a question of how many people have to die before that occurs."

Aides told NBC News that Clinton was expected next week to officially recognize the main opposition movement, the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, with which she is scheduled to meet in Morocco. Britain, France, Turkey and some key Arab leaders have already recognized the opposition.

Fighting intensified Wednesday in the 21-month civil war, which has left 40,000 people dead. The U.N. withdrew its personnel from Damascus, saying conditions were too dangerous.

The government said this week that it wouldn't use chemical weapons on its own people after President Barack Obama warned that doing so would be "totally unacceptable."

<br>


But U.S. officials said this week that the government had ordered its Chemical Weapons Corps to "be prepared," which Washington interpreted as a directive to begin bringing together the components needed to weaponize Syria's chemical stockpiles.

That process would involve mixing "precursor" chemicals for the deadly nerve gas sarin, which could be used in artillery shells, U.S. officials told NBC News, stressing that there was no evidence that process had as yet begun.

Watch World News videos on NBCNews.com

U.S. officials had long believed that the Syrian government was stockpiling the banned chemical weapons before it acknowledged possessing them this summer.

NBC News reported in July that U.S. intelligence agencies believed that in addition to sarin, Syria had access to tabun, a chemical nerve agent, as well as traditional chemical weapons like mustard gas and hydrogen cyanide.

Officials told NBC News at the time that the Syrian government was moving the outlawed weapons around the country, leaving foreign intelligence agencies unsure where they might end up.

Syria is one of only seven nations that hasn't ratified the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention, the arms control agreement that outlaws the production, stockpiling and use of such weapons.

Bombshells filled with chemicals can be carried by Syrian Air Force fighter-bombers, in particular Sukhoi-22/20, MiG-23 and Sukhoi-24 aircraft. In addition, some reports indicate that unguided short-range Frog-7 artillery rockets may be capable of carrying chemical payloads.

In terms of longer-range delivery systems, Syria has a few dozen SS-21 ballistic missiles with a maximum range of 72 miles; 200 Scud-Bs, with a maximum range of 180 miles; and 60 to 120 Scud-Cs, with a maximum range of 300 miles, all of which are mobile and are capable of carrying chemical weapons, according U.S. intelligence officials.

Well. Shit.

[ryacko]

Wait. Wait. What.

Generally the best question to ask... how do they knows these things?
My guess: five years from now, no one can find evidence of Syrian WMD.

[Stark]

The article is full of weasel. 'Believed', 'have access', 'a bunch of crap we learned reading a Janes book'. If there are hard facts they're not in there.

[Sephirius]

I'm less concerned with how and more concerned with why. I'm really wondering if they are doing this (and shutting down their airports) because they are going to start using Chemical Weapons and don't want outside eyes on it.

The last time they cut the internet for a short blip, they shelled/bombed the hell out of a residential area in Aleppo, for what it's worth.