Insight into Syria: Part 3/3: Internet Communication and Worldwide Protest Movement
After having seen a picture of the Syrian intelligence organization and methods as well as having tried to assess the probability of a civil war and what would be its consequences, this last part of the interview focuses on giving a few elements about how people tend to react to Internet censorship and monitoring in the country.
As a reminder, Telecomix recently released 54GB of log files produced by BlueCoat SG-9000 filtering proxies located in Syria and managed by the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment in Damascus. Those devices are devoted to filtering and monitoring nearly the whole country's HTTP traffic, helping authorities to track opponents. Devices from the German company Fortinet are also used to perform protocol-based filtering, which is a technique that comes under Deep Packet Inspect methods and which is used within the Intrusion Prevention System. It allows to block many VPN protocols such as PPTP, L2TP and OpenVPN in Syria, making secure communications extremely difficult to achieve.
With the help of Internet communication, the events happening in Syria rely on comparable ideologies as the other Arab spring revolutions or even "the Outraged" movements that have led to popular protests such as the Wall Street occupation. The last questions of the interview thus try to place this Syrian revolution into the wider context of those various popular movements.
The regime still holds a firm grip on communication infrastructures, notably by...