Snowden: US attempt to monitor emails in Syria botched
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Exiled leaker Edward Snowden strikes once more. In a new interview, he disclosed that the NSA caused a massive internet blackout in Syria following a flubbed attempt to infiltrate its internet network in order to retrieve data from the local email traffic.
In an interview to Wired, Snowden claimed that NSA agents tried to breach a router of one of Syria’s internet carriers in order to monitor emails and intercept them, but the plan failed, plunging Syria’s entire internet network into disarray for a few days.
Defense One revealed this is the first time this affair is made public, and added that according to a US intelligence officer, he himself told Snowden that two years ago, TAO, NSA’s hackers’ unit attempted to achieve US access to email traffic in the bulk of Syria, but something failed and the router went down. Syrian internet users had no idea the US had anything to do with the internet blackout. Snowden further claimed that the US government panicked over this debacle and scrambled to reinstate the internet in Syria in order to cover its tracks, when all the while the Syrians were oblivious to US involvement. Nevertheless, the NSA was unable to fix the malfunction.
Fortunately, the Syrians were able to repair the network without ever finding out the source of the malfunction. Agents used to joke around at TAO’s operations room that ‘if they catch us, we can always say Israel did it’.
In related news, The Washington Post reported that Assad’s government customarily shuts the internet down where it is planning to launch an imminent assault, so during the internet blackout in November 2012, cyber experts said it was the Syrian government that disconnected the network, whereas government sources pointed their own finger at the rebels. No one so much as blamed the US, and the State Department even denounced the attempt to prevent Syrians from using the internet freely, while adding that the US supplied the rebels with some 2,000 “communications units”.
