The Syrian Government's Internet Strategy 45
decora writes "In a recent article on Al-Jazeera, Jillian York of the EFF speculates about the true nature of the Syrian 'hackers' who defaced AnonPlus. She references a University of Toronto analysis from May, which pointed out that the supposed independent hacktivist group the Syrian Electronic Army has a website that is hosted and registered by the Syrian Computer Society — a group that dictator Bashar Al-Asad used to run and that was founded by his brother. York has previously written about the mystery of the pro-Asad twitter floods of April, and the convenient unblocking of social media sites like YouTube and Facebook earlier in the year, which allegedly allowed the Mukhabarat to spy on and entrap opposition activists through forged SSL certificates. She also points out the numerous cases of Syrian bloggers being censored, arrested, and persecuted for their writings online. Is the Syrian example evidence against the vision of internet-as-liberator?"
This should serve as evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
The model of the Internet as a liberator is flawed.
As long as government can control things like DNS resolution and certificate signing then the people are at the mercy of the Internet. Regimes both here and abroad will use the Internet to turn citizens into compliant consumer cattle.
For the Internet to be our liberator it must be decentralized and secure. No one agency must be able to control infrastructure like name resolution or authoritative certificate signing.
What's more, we can't let their identity (that is, the identity the government assigns each of us) become compulsory in cyberspace.
If they can't control the flow of communication and they can't control who communicates (by identifying them) then they cannot use the Internet to control the people.
Up to now the Internet has interpreted censorship as damage and routed around it.
The new Web buzzword.0 model of monolithic branded services, untrustworthy CA roots, and government identity is not designed to route around attempts at meddling.
This is why revisions to empower the people must be decentralized and federated.
The American example is much better evidence (Score:1, Insightful)
After twenty years of *world wide web* republicans and democrats still dominate the political scene with just as much surveillance and spamming.. Censorship is hardly necessary
The internet is a tool.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not a liberator, it's not an educator, it's not an oppressor, it's just a tool.
You can use it for those things, and many more, but it isn't any of them.