Image by james.gordon6108 via Flickr
It was officially declared on Saturday, by the officials of the United States government, that it is highly concerned and keeping a sharp eye on the Internet shutdown activates in Syria. The secretary of State, Hillary Clinton passed a threatening statement against the government trying to hush the protesters; she stated that the government "cannot prevent the transition currently taking place." She declared that "we are deeply concerned by reports that Internet service has been shut down across much of Syria, as have some mobile communication networks." The U.S. has been always debating for freedom of speech, hence indirectly supporting all the deadly anti-government protests rage across the Middle Eastern nations, Hillary added that "we condemn any effort to suppress the Syrian people's exercise of their rights to free expression, assembly, and association." According to the collected information from local sources, the Internet lines were non-functional in Damascus and the coastal city of Latakia on Friday. Whereas it was estimated by a US-based Internet monitoring firm that almost around two-third of the whole country did not had access to internet due to the outage of network. Clinton pointed out that the government of Syria, under the command of President Bashar al-Assad, "has a history of restricting the Internet in an attempt to prevent the Syrian people from accessing and sharing information.” One of the elite U.S. diplomat claimed that “The Syrian government must understand that attempting to silence its population cannot prevent the transition currently taking place. We believe that even in the face of significant obstacles, the Syrian people will, and should, find a way to make their voices heard.”
Image via WikipediaThe internet traffic in Syria was suspended unannounced and abruptly by the orders of the Syrian government, just in attempt to suppress the fast-growing revolt in the Middle Eastern nation. According to an internet traffic monitory firm, Renesys, the blockage “starting at 3:35 UTC today, lead to approximately two thirds of all Syrian networks being unreachable from the global Internet.” It was published on the official website of Renesys that “over the course of roughly half an hour, the routes to 40 of 59 networks were withdrawn from the global routing table.”Almost every mobile phone operator and Internet service provider (ISP) was largely affected by this unreasonable act. It was stated in today’s issue of The Wall Street Journal, that all the government-run websites of Syria, like the Oil Ministry’s website, were still operational even at the time of the suspension. Syria has kept a sporadically spread ban on the major online social networking services, like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, for the last several months. But this time the internet was not blocked for only these handfuls of websites, but the full time internet access was suspended in the most of the country.
Image via Wikipedia
During a speech on Thursday morning, President Barack Obama declared the official stance of the U.S. government over the role of technology in the the uprisings occurring in Middle East and Africa. He acclaimed all the changes that the role of technology has brought about and stated that this technology-led uprisings and movements have laid even more stress on the support of U.S. to ensure proper and free access to information on the Internet. “In fact, real reform will not come at the ballot box alone. Through our efforts we must support those basic rights to speak your mind and access information,” said Obama. He added that “We will support open access to the Internet, and the right of journalists to be heard — whether it’s a big news organization or a blogger. In the 21st century, information is power; the truth cannot be hidden; and the legitimacy of governments will ultimately depend on active and informed citizens.”
