Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Mobilization from the Margins
- 2 Decentralization of Revolutionary Unrest: Dispersion Hypothesis
- 3 Vanguards at the Periphery: A Network Formulation
- 4 Civil War and Contagion in Small Worlds
- 5 Peripheral Influence: Experimentations in Collective Risk Taking
- 6 Decentralization and Power: Novel Modes of Social Organization
- 7 Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Civil War and Contagion in Small Worlds
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 July 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Mobilization from the Margins
- 2 Decentralization of Revolutionary Unrest: Dispersion Hypothesis
- 3 Vanguards at the Periphery: A Network Formulation
- 4 Civil War and Contagion in Small Worlds
- 5 Peripheral Influence: Experimentations in Collective Risk Taking
- 6 Decentralization and Power: Novel Modes of Social Organization
- 7 Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the literature on social protest, organizations matter principally as mechanisms for coordinating action and mobilizing resources (human and otherwise) through the application of incentives; their impact on social interaction tends to go unnoticed
Roger V. Gould, Insurgent Identities, p. 21Edward Snowden, a fugitive former system administrator for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a previous National Security Agency (NSA) contractor, ascribed the only multi-day countrywide disruption of the Internet and fast cellular communications in Syria in 2012, and the longest during the conflict, to the US National Security Agency. This claim, if true, provides a unique opportunity for studying the effects of information and communication technology on the course of urban conflict in the form of an experiment run in Syria by the NSA. Snowden claims
One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO – a division of NSA hackers – had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead – rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet.
Comparing the above with a description of the disruption from a data science and open intelligence company, which monitored the Syrian Internet at the time, is intriguing:
In Syria all backhaul for cell networks is done on IP and … we were able to notice all IP infrastructure went down in Syria. That means the cell networks did not go down because the physical layer went dark, but because the IP layers stopped functioning (core routers were off, and DNS was down).
The above email provides support for the statement on tampering with routers. No physical disruption took place, it was a software malfunction which caused the collapse of main routers and the Internet Protocol (IP) layer.
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- Leading from the Periphery and Network Collective Action , pp. 103 - 139Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2017