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posted by on Tuesday July 21 2015, @04:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the someone-stomp-these-guys-already dept.

From this article on vice.com:

The self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) has severely restricted use of the internet in its de-facto capital of Raqqa, requiring that all residents — including those in the militant group's ranks — access the web from observed internet cafes, according to international monitoring organizations.

An IS leaflet photographed and circulated by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the activist group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently (RBSS), advises that "all owners of shops with satellite internet must comply with the following: Removing Wi-Fi boosters in internet cafés as well as private wireless adaptors, even for soldiers of the Islamic State."

...

Activists worry that internet restriction is intended to clamp down on citizen journalists, human rights workers, and potential IS defectors.

Even under IS rule, activists have managed to sneak out videos, images, and accounts of daily life. In September, a woman with a camera hidden in her niqab walked through the city narrating her experience. The smuggled footage was aired on French TV.


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  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday July 21 2015, @08:41PM

    by looorg (578) on Tuesday July 21 2015, @08:41PM (#212082)

    So a group that claim control over a territory with a theocracy based "government" wants to control where their population or subjects are getting their information from or whom they communicate with. That is not really a shocker. You can pretty much just look at their neighbors, they are all doing it to some extent.

    Sure it might be to crack down on all them pesky freelance journalists, human rights people or average Ali citizen that once lived in Iraq or Syria and now find themselves living in the ISIS-caliphate. They might also want to control their own "soldiers" whom clearly have and follow very poor communication protocols -- from memory I recall the news of one of them standing outside a "secret" base and sending selfies on twitter only to find said base bombed a day or so later. From other current news sources the leadership are apparently not to fond of some of the more spontaneous beheading videos some are sharing on the internet so they are putting a stop to that to; not the actual decapitations but sending videos of it all over -- apparently some of the more moderate Muslims was less then impressed and it was scaring some of them off, which is hardly a surprise.

    I doubt it will have to much of an impact. It's not like people are going to stop playing with their phones all the time everywhere. Even if they can't upload things now from the convenience of their home, bombed out ruin or internet cafe I'm sure it's not to hard to smuggle things in and out of the country; after all it's a warzone and the borders seem to have more holes then cheese with all the people and products going in and out. Not like an SD-card with the latest pictures is going to be hard to get across.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by CRCulver on Tuesday July 21 2015, @10:38PM

    by CRCulver (4390) on Tuesday July 21 2015, @10:38PM (#212115) Homepage

    So a group that claim control over a territory with a theocracy based "government" wants to control where their population or subjects are getting their information from or whom they communicate with. That is not really a shocker. You can pretty much just look at their neighbors, they are all doing it to some extent.

    Actually, this IS development does represent a step down from the Syrian norm. When I travelled around Syria in 2008-2009 before the civil war, sure, it was a police state to a large degee, but people could still browse the web anonymously. When you went into literally any netcafe, you could ask the proprietor "What's the proxy?" The first time, he would say he didn't know what you were talking about, but if you just asked again, he'd immediately drop the pretence and show you how to enable Tor or some similar way of getting around the country's filtering and surveillance. Also, there were a large number of open wifi hotspots in Latakia, Aleppo and Damascus.