In a profile of Snowden published today and as reported by The Verge, the whistleblower sheds some new light on an incident that happened 2 years ago:
An elite hacking unit in the National Security Agency had reportedly been attempting to install malware on a central router within Syria — a feat that would have allowed the agency to access a good amount of the country's internet traffic. Instead, it ended up accidentally rendered the router unusable, causing Syria's internet connection to go dark.
So, the Syria internet outage was not caused by a panicking al-Assad or loyalist forces, but rather a blunder by our own government. However, 2 years ago, our media, both on the right and left were saying very different and
very inaccurate things.
Huffington Post reported:
The "most likely" method used by Syrian authorities to conduct this blackout was to "tweak the routing tables," essentially blocking the transference of information by sending it all into a cyber "blackhole."
Fox News gave an even more bold accusation:
It’s also a pretty sure sign that the regime of Bashar al-Assad is either getting nervous about how it is being perceived in the world, or that it is planning something unspeakably harsh in the coming days and wants as little information emerging from that country as possible.
While I am by no means defending the likes of al-Assad, Mubarak, or Gaddafi, this situation really makes you think about our mainstream media's unfortunate tendency to both speculate and essentially demonize anybody they see as fundamentally opposed to Westernization.