Rebel fighters battle Syrian government forces: FreedomHouse2 via Wikimedia Commons
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Do Now
If Internet service was suddenly shut down in the United States, in what ways would it most impact your life?
Introduction
On Thursday, November 29, Internet and cell phone service throughout almost all of Syria was shut down. The service disruption continued through Friday, forcing an airport closure. The Syrian government has been widely suspected of disabling service, although President Bashar al-Assad, claimed that it was "terrorists" cut the cable. The shutdown marks another chapter in Syria's bloody, ongoing civil war, which began in March 2011, in the midst of the Arab Spring. Rebels attempting to overthrow the county's authoritarian government, have routinely used social media on the Web to communicate with each other and send images of the war to the rest of the world in an effort to highlight the military's attacks on civilians.
Only four internet cables connect Syria to the outside world, according to Matthew Prince, CEO of CloudFlare, a web security company. Three of them run underseas, and the fourth is an overland line through Turkey, making it very unlikely that anyone other than the Syria government had caused the blackout. "In order for a whole country outage, all four of these cables would have had to been cut simultaneously," Prince wrote in his investigation of the incident. "That is unlikely to have happened."
