Syria fights Arab spring in cyberspace

I’M IN Beirut, a city whose devastation from decades of civil war still overshadows even its own modern marketing. The hotel’s tourist materials are exercises in peculiarly low self-esteem, referring to it as a “once-beautiful city”, and encouraging you to get out and see the rest of “unspoiled” Lebanon as soon as possible.

Spite the messaging and stay. Beirut seems a defiantly cosmopolitan capital, with the determination and nightlife of 1990s Berlin. I’m here to talk about the internet at the “International Freedom of Expression Exchange” conference. But just as it is hard to talk about the city without acknowledging its past, it’s hard to talk about the net without noting the unrest in the region.

While Lebanon is at peace, its netizens are watching events near by with active concern. Its neighbour, Syria, appears to be putting down an internal uprising with brutal efficiency. Foreign journalists are banned from travelling into Syria. A trickle of information about strikes and crackdowns passes over a disrupted and slow local net.

While the internet magnified and united the protesters in Tunisia and Egypt, the online news is far more ambiguous. Unlike other Middle East governments, during the “Arab spring” in February, the Syrian state declared it was removing, not increasing, internet censorship. Blocks on YouTube, Facebook and Blogger were lifted.

A few activists were suspicious. Regimes in the Middle East are masters of cyclical “rope-a-dope” policies: temporary liberalisation to attract opposition figures out into the open, followed by ruthless crackdowns. Syria seems to have adapted the same strategy to its online opposition. Security agents watched the newly unlocked Facebook for signs of organised protest, then visited those activists, and threatened them and their families until they handed over their social network passwords.

With these skeleton keys, the secret police can watch and interfere with any virtual organising from within (or at least imply they can). And, unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, Syria’s own pro-government forces are as adept as the opposition online. On Twitter, where outsiders learned and retransmitted the message of the Egyptian protesters, anyone following the “#Syria” tag will see demonstrators drowned out by repeated messages of support for the Assad regime.

The Tunisian and Egyptian opposition had the support online of a shady posse of hackers, who would mirror content, disable government websites and even co-ordinate to maintain service when the Egyptian authorities clumsily shut down the web.

In Syria, president Bashar al-Assad has his own online posse, the “Syrian Electronic Army”. Members pick fights with the country’s online critics, spam the Facebook accounts of Hillary Clinton and Nicolas Sarkozy with pro-regime messages, and deface western websites. Its hacking victories are opportunistic: covering the website of Leamington Spa city council in pro-regime graffiti seems a long way from the streets of Damascus. But such random actions disrupt online the coherent image protesters would like to present, of an isolated, unsophisticated regime about to fall.

Syria’s authorities are far from unsophisticated in facing off online protest. By infiltrating the social networking sites that built previous protests, and by subtly encouraging its own brand of online messaging and civil disobedience, the country has already avoided the inept and blatant stand-offs that dogged the Mubarak administration.

No one is going to trip a nationwide internet kill switch here. The internet is slow in Syria, but no one can prove that is a deliberate blockade.

Strange things happen when you use iPhone Apps and Google websites in the country: but then, they always did, thanks to US sanctions against providing services to Syrian citizens.

Last month, computer analysts spotted Syrian ISPs attempting to spy on its own users. When Syrians visited Facebook using Facebook’s new secure “https” service, they were invisibly redirected to an internal Syrian server, which attempted to intercept and decode their conversation with the real service.

Secure https transmissions can detect such subterfuge, but only by warning users with a complex-sounding error message about “forged certificates”. Since most of us just click through such warnings, the Syrian trap may well have caught many users.

Forged certificates are blatant attempts to interfere with internet users. They are rarely seen outside theoretical attacks created by computer security professionals. Most outsiders, including Facebook itself, have expressed scepticism that a country like Syria could or would use such academic strategies.

But Egypt and Tunisia taught the world online activism has a real effect on real-world protests. And that means those who wish to shut it down must develop their own toolkits.

Even among Beirut’s citizens, the unrest in Syria seems unclear. Online, it’s even more confused. Syria’s success may have been to introduce the fog of civil war online. That may suffice to keep its real-world actions out of western headlines.