Cyberwar…box smart

suspicious of the regime’s motives. Young, Kurdish, and recently finished with his mandatory military service, Othman opposed President Bashar al-Assad. Working for an Internet service provider, he knew that Syria—like many other countries, including China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain—controlled its citizens’ access to the Web. The same technology the government used to censor websites allowed it to monitor Internet traffic and intercept communications. Popular services such as Facebook, Skype, Google Maps, and YouTube gave Syria’s revolutionaries capabilities that until a couple of decades ago would have been available only to the world’s most sophisticated militaries. But as long as Damascus controlled the Internet, they’d be using these tools under the eye of the government. businessweek

Grownups know that what they put on the net can be traced back to their IP and, more to the point, often to their home.

Grownups either do as I do and post under my own name or get slightly clever and use proxies or, more clever still, use encryption and IP spoofing browsers. Were I in Syria, I fear, I would be using every trick I know not to be identified.