Syria Rebels Find Skype Useful, but Dangers Lurk

When Syria’s Internet service disappeared Thursday, government officials first blamed rebel attacks. Activist groups blamed the government and viewed the blackout as a sign that troops would violently clamp down on rebels.

But having dealt with periodic outages for more than a year, the opposition had anticipated a full shutdown of Syria’s Internet service providers. To prepare, they have spent months smuggling communications equipment like mobile handsets and portable satellite phones into the country.

“We’re very well equipped here,” said Albaraa Abdul Rahman, 27, an activist in Saqba, a poor suburb 20 minutes outside Damascus. He said he was in touch with an expert in Homs who helped connect his office and 10 others like it in and around Damascus.

Using the connection, the activists in Saqba talked to rebel fighters on Skype and relayed to overseas activists details about clashes with government forces. A video showed the rebels’ bare-bones room, four battery backups that could power a laptop for eight hours and a generator set up on a balcony.

For months, rebels fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad have used Skype, a peer-to-peer Internet communication system, to organize and talk to outside news organizations and activists. A few days ago, Jad al-Yamani, an activist in Homs, sent a message to rebel fighters that tanks were moving toward a government checkpoint.

He notified the other fighters so that they could go observe the checkpoint. “Through Skype you know how the army moves or can stop it,” Mr. Yamani said.

On Friday, Dawoud Sleiman, 39, a member of the antigovernment Ahrar al-Shamal Battalion, part of the Free Syrian Army, reached out to other members of the rebel group. They were set up at the government’s Wadi Aldaif military base in Idlib, a province near the Turkish border that has seen heavy fighting, and connected to Skype via satellite Internet service.

Mr. Sleiman, who is based in Turkey, said the Free Syrian Army stopped using cellphone networks and land lines months ago and instead relies almost entirely on Skype. “Brigade members communicate through the hand-held devices,” he said.

This week rebels posted an announcement via Skype that called for the arrest of the head of intelligence in Idlib, who is accused of killing five rebels. “A big financial prize will be offered to anyone who brings the head of this guy,” the message read. “One of our brothers abroad has donated the cash.”

If the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were Twitter Revolutions, then Syria is becoming the Skype Rebellion. To get around a near-nationwide Internet shutdown, rebels have armed themselves with mobile satellite phones and dial-up modems.

In many cases, relatives and supporters living outside Syria bought the equipment and had it smuggled in, mostly through Lebanon and Turkey.

That equipment has allowed the rebels to continue to communicate almost entirely via Skype with little interruption, despite the blackout. “How the government used its weapons against the revolution, that is how activists use Skype,” Mr. Abdul Rahman said.

“We haven’t seen any interruption in the way Skype is being used,” said David Clinch, an editorial director of Storyful, a group that verifies social media posts for news organizations, including The New York Times (Mr. Clinch has served as a consultant for Skype).

Mr. Assad, who once fashioned himself as a reformer and the father of Syria’s Internet, has largely left the country’s access intact during the 20-month struggle with rebels. The government appeared to abandon that strategy on Thursday, when most citizens lost access. Some Syrians could still get online using service from Turkey. On Friday, Syrian officials blamed technical problems for the cutoff.

The shutdown is only the latest tactic in the escalating technology war waged in Arab Spring countries.

But several technology experts warned that the use of the Internet by rebels in Syria, even those relying on Skype, could leave them vulnerable to government surveillance.

Liam Stack contributed reporting from New York; Hala Droubi from Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon.

News Analysis: The Dangers of Allowing an Adversary Access to a Network

G. Dagli Orti/De Agostini, via Getty Images The Trojan Horse, as depicted on Greek pottery. The Trojan Horse in modern cyberspace is still something to be feared.

Schoolchildren learn the tale of the Trojan Horse, the giant gift in which Odysseus and a platoon of 30 Greek soldiers hid to gain access to the heavily defended city.

Thousands of years later, it remains a thoroughly modern concept that is increasingly found at the heart of cyberwarfare strategies. Modern Trojan horses are computer code or vulnerabilities hidden in software or hardware that would allow a spy or an attacker to gain access to an adversary’s computers and networks. Find a way to be invited into the computers of your enemy’s weapons and military systems and you can render them useless in the face of an attack.

For more than a decade, Pentagon officials have been anxious about the growing reliance by the United States electronics industry on Chinese manufacturers. As the Internet has become the nation’s critical infrastructure weaving together commerce and power systems and even military command and control, it has become increasingly unthinkable to have a foreign presence in the network. Their fear is that those building and maintaining the network could build in a Trojan horse.

Thus it was striking that the word “Trojan” was not mentioned in a 52-page report issued Monday by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence focusing on the activities of two giant Chinese telecommunications firms, Huawei and ZTE, which have long been suspected of having links to the Chinese government. Beijing has been suspected of trying to steal American corporate and government secrets through computer espionage.

Stuxnet, a surreptitious program that was reportedly designed by United States and Israeli intelligence agencies to afflict the Iranian nuclear enrichment program, had many of the properties of a highly sophisticated Trojan horse. The program was at the heart of a concerted effort to delay or destroy the Iranian Natanz nuclear fuel facility. The attack damaged centrifuges and might have provided a surveillance window into Iranian activities by giving Western intelligence agencies unfettered access to the desktop computers of Iranian project managers.

The program acted as a Trojan horse, perhaps delivered first on a USB memory stick, that then spread through computer networks inside the secret facility before reaching the outside world. A striking map of the paths followed by Stuxnet infection created by researchers at Symantec, the Silicon Valley computer security firm, indicates that Stuxnet actually broke out of Natanz, rather than breaking in, just as the Greek soldiers climbed out of the horse at night.

Possibly because the United States is making Trojan horses, that term — if it exists in the House report on Huawei and ZTE — is said to be found only in a classified annex to the report that has not been made available.

The published report consists of a series of allegations about the activities of the companies, including bribery and surveillance, but little hard evidence. Reports of “suspicious” incidents, including an ostensible case of “beaconing” from Cricket, a Texas wireless operator that uses Huawei equipment, have been heatedly denied by Huawei.

If this issue is important enough, said Richard A. Clarke, who served as the nation’s counterterrorism overseer in both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, there should be ways of declassifying the information. “They’re making important accusations,” he said. “Important accusations require important proof.”

According to several former government officials, the real issue is not what has happened in the past but rather what might happen if Huawei gear were widely used in American telecommunications networks. Such use would mean that the company would have to serve and fix the network, requiring extensive access for its technical personnel to telecommunications networks in the United States.

The danger in letting your potential adversary maintain your network has already been demonstrated, according to Mr. Clarke, who wrote in “Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It.” In 2007, a remarkably sophisticated computer attack by Israel rendered Syrian antiaircraft radar useless. Israeli aircraft were able to destroy a Syrian nuclear reactor without any response from the country’s military. He says it was vulnerable because the Syrians had relied on outsiders to maintain the network.

Mr. Clarke disputes a recent New Yorker article that asserted that the bombing attack was supported by conventional electronic warfare, which involves jamming or deceiving an enemies’ radar with high-powered radio waves. “Regular electronic warfare fills the frequencies with static and overpowers the frequencies,” he said. “That wakes people up. That didn’t happen. The Syrians didn’t notice the jamming of their radars.”

In 2009, The New York Times reported that an American semiconductor industry executive who claimed to have direct knowledge of the operation said that technology for disabling the radars had been supplied by Americans to the Israeli electronic intelligence agency, Unit 8200.

If his account is true, it may be the real reason that the government has worked so hard to make sure that American computer networks are not made in China.