Tunisian Govt Wages Cyberwar On Dissidents

In case you hadn’t heard (I hadn’t), there have been some protests in Tunisia recently, thousands of people campaigning to get a bit of economic and social change. Tunisia is a repressed sort of place. While technically a democracy, it is widely seen as authoritarian, and for good reason. They aren’t so keen on free speech – dissenting speech specifically, but that isn’t all they censor. The Tunisian Govt performs internet filtering on par with China’s Great Firewall, but more aggressive – all video sharing sites are blocked, for one. In 2008, Facebook was blocked entirely, though that was later revoked. They are also very quick to censor dissenting opinions on blogs and individual Facebook pages, with some things blocked within hours of their creation. It’s a sad state of affairs, but its hardly remarkable.

One thing that they do that actively piques my interest is this – not content to merely filter, the Govt phishes, scams and cracks its way into the online accounts of dissident bloggers to remove content at the source. Typical strategy seems to be that they break into a dissident’s email account and use that as a launchpad to break into blogs, Facebook accounts and other places to eradicate dissenting opinions. Keep in mind that the people targeted by these attacks are legal Tunisian citizens, the very people this Govt is charged with serving.

Another effect of these attacks is that it occasionally reveals the real name and location of these online dissidents. After the most recent wave of attacks, two well-known online dissidents were arrested. They do not appear to have been heard from since.

Needless to say I am rather appalled. The internet is wonderful because it is a haven of free speech – most anyone can access it, speak their mind, and remain anonymous. In many ways, the internet has changed the way people protest. But that is being destroyed in Tunisia. People should not fear their government, yet that is certainly what they seem to be aiming to achieve.

There are not many causes that can convince me to get up off my ass, but this is one of them. But the problem is, what can be done? I don’t see a way to help this situation in the slightest, being half a world away and poor. Heck, maybe nothing short of a full scale revolution will fix this. It is a sorry state of affairs.

And don’t even get me started on Anonymous. They did make an appearance, get angry and DDoS some government sites, but they don’t change anything. Anonymous aren’t news.

I guess it all comes down to this. Censorship is bad in almost every single context, but in the modern world it is….common. We no longer get excited about it. We no longer boycott over it. We just don’t care.

But in my mind, it is one thing to censor, and another thing entirely to crack.