Revolver
13th August 2014, 23:21
Louis Proyect has a very interesting article (http://louisproyect.org/2014/08/13/qatar-hamas-and-the-islamic-state-is-in-defense-of-dialectics/) up concerning the tendency towards Manichaeism and reductionism in approaching Middle East politics Some humor is tossed in, along with some idiocy (an email concerning Hamas and IS/ISIS), but of particular interest is the suggestion that the Middle East is complex in ways that defies reductionism and any monolithic ruling class response to the unfolding crisis, although what makes it very interesting to me is that it would seem to point to ruling class factionalism on some key points. It also echoes a recent Guardian guide (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/04/-sp-middle-east-politics-2014-egypt-syria-palestine-iraq-gaza)to the Middle East by Ian Black, and no doubt reflects the frustration of Iraq’s decimated left (http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/18143/on-recent-events-in-mosul-and-other-cities-in-iraq).
What can be done in this situation? I think that there are some clear avenues for action in the US, including organizational support for Palestinian human rights, but I also think that it requires shaking off the sometimes myopic focus on the Israeli occupation, as bad as it is. Obviously not everyone is near sighted on this issue, but it does seem like there's a relative comfort in protesting the Occupation and considerable discomfort in confronting US intervention against IS/ISIS, the support for the Egyptian military regime (which should be obvious enough to pro-Palestinian groups here) or even domestic issues with clear connections to the conflict (such as NSA surveillance). Each daily bombardment of news (http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/18878/arabian-peninsula-media-roundup-(august-12)) suggests that we need a much more comprehensive understanding of this conflict that looks beyond the narrow expressed American ruling class interests and ties it to developments within the US. A complicated project, to be sure, given that today's Snowden revelation (http://time.com/3107684/snowden-nsa-syria-cybersecurity/) that the US accidentally took Syria offline two years ago. While I have yet to read the full interview (http://www.wired.com/2014/08/edward-snowden/), the portion concerning Syria is interesting:
By the time he went to work for Booz Allen in the spring of 2013, Snowden was thoroughly disillusioned, yet he had not lost his capacity for shock. One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA hackers—had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn’t know that the US government was responsible. (This is the first time the claim has been revealed.)
Inside the TAO operations center, the panicked government hackers had what Snowden calls an “oh shit” moment. They raced to remotely repair the router, desperate to cover their tracks and prevent the Syrians from discovering the sophisticated infiltration software used to access the network. But because the router was bricked, they were powerless to fix the problem.
Fortunately for the NSA, the Syrians were apparently more focused on restoring the nation’s Internet than on tracking down the cause of the outage. Back at TAO’s operations center, the tension was broken with a joke that contained more than a little truth: “If we get caught, we can always point the finger at Israel.”
While nothing surprises me these days, this is not anything that Snowden claims direct knowledge of; it was relayed by someone who claimed direct knowledge. But if it was accidental, it would at least appear to conflict with what Wired was reporting at the time (http://www.revleft.com/vb/But Syria’s apparently systematic disconnection from the internet actually began at least a week earlier, according to research by the SecDev Group internet analytics firm. Around the middle of the month, Syria’s ordinary handful of daily requests to withdraw from Syria’s BGP [Border Gateway Protocol] routes started to grow to a few hundred per. These connections are what enables one national network to interface with the broader internet. On November 22, the withdrawals suddenly jumped to more than 2000. An even greater spike occurred on November 29.):
But Syria’s apparently systematic disconnection from the internet actually began at least a week earlier, according to research by the SecDev Group (http://www.secdev.com/) internet analytics firm. Around the middle of the month, Syria’s ordinary handful of daily requests to withdraw from Syria’s BGP [Border Gateway Protocol] routes started to grow to a few hundred per. These connections are what enables one national network to interface with the broader internet. On November 22, the withdrawals suddenly jumped to more than 2000. An even greater spike occurred on November 29.
“When a country withdraws itself from the internet using BGP such as Syria has, it means that on a technical level no one knows how to get there anymore, because there are no longer any paths, effectively shutting off the internet in the region,” SecDev explains in a draft report.
“On some networks there are still some paths in place,” Ginley adds. “But this could be to maintain some limited communication or perhaps it’s just an error on their side.”
The communications blackout — which, according to some local reports, also briefly included cell and landline phone service (https://twitter.com/ericuman/status/274165609867145216) – is hugely important to the war effort in Syria. The rebels don’t just use these networks to share information with one another. They train their forces (http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/syria-youtube-facebook/) and document regime atrocities with YouTube clips. The government has been known to shut down internet service in a particular city in advance of a major attack.
This suggests exceedingly complicated and close involvement in the Syrian war by the US, in ways that are obscured by divisions over the propriety of involvement. There are a number of potential explanations: ruling class factionalism, human error (as Snowden himself suggests), or unreliable information or a mix of these.
This raises several questions for US-based groups. It seems clear that the US involvement has been deep for quite a while, but we are getting more and more insight into just how intense the involvement is on a daily basis. It is also clearly connected to the growth of the US-based security state and crackdowns on dissent at home, including crackdowns aimed at movements with no clearly discernible relationship to the Middle East conflicts (such as the dispersion of Occupy). Time to build a framework and an international solidarity movement that connects the dots and the people, because the class war seems to be intensifying from above.
What can be done in this situation? I think that there are some clear avenues for action in the US, including organizational support for Palestinian human rights, but I also think that it requires shaking off the sometimes myopic focus on the Israeli occupation, as bad as it is. Obviously not everyone is near sighted on this issue, but it does seem like there's a relative comfort in protesting the Occupation and considerable discomfort in confronting US intervention against IS/ISIS, the support for the Egyptian military regime (which should be obvious enough to pro-Palestinian groups here) or even domestic issues with clear connections to the conflict (such as NSA surveillance). Each daily bombardment of news (http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/18878/arabian-peninsula-media-roundup-(august-12)) suggests that we need a much more comprehensive understanding of this conflict that looks beyond the narrow expressed American ruling class interests and ties it to developments within the US. A complicated project, to be sure, given that today's Snowden revelation (http://time.com/3107684/snowden-nsa-syria-cybersecurity/) that the US accidentally took Syria offline two years ago. While I have yet to read the full interview (http://www.wired.com/2014/08/edward-snowden/), the portion concerning Syria is interesting:
By the time he went to work for Booz Allen in the spring of 2013, Snowden was thoroughly disillusioned, yet he had not lost his capacity for shock. One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO—a division of NSA hackers—had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead—rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet—although the public didn’t know that the US government was responsible. (This is the first time the claim has been revealed.)
Inside the TAO operations center, the panicked government hackers had what Snowden calls an “oh shit” moment. They raced to remotely repair the router, desperate to cover their tracks and prevent the Syrians from discovering the sophisticated infiltration software used to access the network. But because the router was bricked, they were powerless to fix the problem.
Fortunately for the NSA, the Syrians were apparently more focused on restoring the nation’s Internet than on tracking down the cause of the outage. Back at TAO’s operations center, the tension was broken with a joke that contained more than a little truth: “If we get caught, we can always point the finger at Israel.”
While nothing surprises me these days, this is not anything that Snowden claims direct knowledge of; it was relayed by someone who claimed direct knowledge. But if it was accidental, it would at least appear to conflict with what Wired was reporting at the time (http://www.revleft.com/vb/But Syria’s apparently systematic disconnection from the internet actually began at least a week earlier, according to research by the SecDev Group internet analytics firm. Around the middle of the month, Syria’s ordinary handful of daily requests to withdraw from Syria’s BGP [Border Gateway Protocol] routes started to grow to a few hundred per. These connections are what enables one national network to interface with the broader internet. On November 22, the withdrawals suddenly jumped to more than 2000. An even greater spike occurred on November 29.):
But Syria’s apparently systematic disconnection from the internet actually began at least a week earlier, according to research by the SecDev Group (http://www.secdev.com/) internet analytics firm. Around the middle of the month, Syria’s ordinary handful of daily requests to withdraw from Syria’s BGP [Border Gateway Protocol] routes started to grow to a few hundred per. These connections are what enables one national network to interface with the broader internet. On November 22, the withdrawals suddenly jumped to more than 2000. An even greater spike occurred on November 29.
“When a country withdraws itself from the internet using BGP such as Syria has, it means that on a technical level no one knows how to get there anymore, because there are no longer any paths, effectively shutting off the internet in the region,” SecDev explains in a draft report.
“On some networks there are still some paths in place,” Ginley adds. “But this could be to maintain some limited communication or perhaps it’s just an error on their side.”
The communications blackout — which, according to some local reports, also briefly included cell and landline phone service (https://twitter.com/ericuman/status/274165609867145216) – is hugely important to the war effort in Syria. The rebels don’t just use these networks to share information with one another. They train their forces (http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/syria-youtube-facebook/) and document regime atrocities with YouTube clips. The government has been known to shut down internet service in a particular city in advance of a major attack.
This suggests exceedingly complicated and close involvement in the Syrian war by the US, in ways that are obscured by divisions over the propriety of involvement. There are a number of potential explanations: ruling class factionalism, human error (as Snowden himself suggests), or unreliable information or a mix of these.
This raises several questions for US-based groups. It seems clear that the US involvement has been deep for quite a while, but we are getting more and more insight into just how intense the involvement is on a daily basis. It is also clearly connected to the growth of the US-based security state and crackdowns on dissent at home, including crackdowns aimed at movements with no clearly discernible relationship to the Middle East conflicts (such as the dispersion of Occupy). Time to build a framework and an international solidarity movement that connects the dots and the people, because the class war seems to be intensifying from above.