Syria and Facebook, cont.

The Guardian's Ian Black has this important tidbit on Syria post-Facebook unbanning:

Syrian users have now been blocked from entering the word "proxy" in any search engine and any page with the word "proxy" in the URL address will not open. Syrians, in short, have lost internet anonymity. "Under the guise of lifting restrictions on the internet, the authorities have in fact tightened their control," warns Malik al-Abdeh of London-based Barada TV. "No sane internet user will enter the now unblocked Facebook and visit a page that contains criticisms of the regime, or, worse still, a page that organises demonstrations as the Egyptians and Tunisians have done. The irony is that Syrian internet users are actually better off under the old system. Unblocking Facebook while cracking down on proxies and https, and maintaining the same censorship apparatus run by the secret police, is totally meaningless." Not much sign, then, of a revival of the short-lived Damascus spring of Bashar al-Assad's early days.

Comments

[Leah]

Searches for proxies and entering in proxy as a URL was blocked when I was in Syria from 2008-9. I would often try to search for proxies and it was forbidden, until someone told me that I had to get one that was passed around on a USB.

[Jillian C . York]

I don't think this is news - I recall it happening before. In any case, lots of cybercafes in Syria already have circumvention tools installed.

Interesting fun fact: US sanctions on Syria prevent many of these tools from being exported legally (though it seems that, either because or in spite of this, Chinese-built circumvention tools are more popular in Syria anyway).

Also, proxies are not anonymizers; accessing Facebook via one does not mean that your information is kept from authorities (though anonymizers such as Tor do exist and are in use in Syria). If a Syrian was using his or her real name before the unbanning, then there's no reason to believe authorities couldn't find him/her. Additionally, since Facebook demands the use of real names and often enforces this policy--particularly when it comes to activists--there's no guarantee of safely using a pseudonym.

Lastly, I would add that Syrian--and all--Facebook users should turn on secure browsing on Facebook (HTTPS), now available to all. It's at least one step they can take, aside from quitting Facebook entirely.