On February 25, 2013, a 26-year-old Syrian "hacktivist"
who had fled Damascus was sitting up late in his apartment in a Washington
suburb watching the Syrian civil war unfold on Twitter.
A man living near an air base southwest of Damascus tweeted that a
SCUD missile had been fired and its fiery tail could be seen streaking north.
Syria is believed to have at least 700 such SCUDs, which are slow and heavy
1960s-vintage short-range tactical ballistic missiles that the Soviet Union
exported to various client states around the world. Having done his compulsory
military service in a Syrian artillery unit, Dlshad Othman knew that this SCUD
was likely headed for the northern Syrian city of Aleppo. He also knew the
missile would be landing in roughly six minutes.
But who would see the Tweet in time?
As he waited helplessly for the SCUD to land, Othman hatched an
idea: Set up an early warning system that could take citizen reports of a
ballistic missile launch, calculate the likely target, and send alerts in real
time to civilians inside the strike zone.
SCUD missiles can be clearly seen when they are launched; in clear
weather they can sometimes be spotted for great distances and their trajectory
is evident to the naked eye. Syrians have posted many images of SCUD launches
on YouTube.
But death by SCUD is sudden. The whoosh of an incoming missile is
followed almost instantaneously by the explosion.
Syria has fired dozens of SCUDs and other missiles at targets in
northeastern Syria. According to the Syrian Missile Launch Database, maintained
by the Washington Institute of Near East Policy, between December 2012 and
March 2013 the Assad regime
fired dozens of surface-to-surface missiles against
opposition-held areas, including major cities and towns such as Aleppo, Al
Raqqah, and Der Ez Zor. Human Rights Watch reported that four SCUDS fired on
Aleppo in February killed 141 civilians, including 71 children.
Othman's SCUD early warning system began operating on Wednesday.
It is called Aymta, which means
"when" in Arabic. Users can opt to receive alerts by phone, text
message, SMS, e-mail or RSS feed, or, if the regime cuts off internet access,
as it often does, via a broadcast on satellite television or radio frequencies
outside of regime control. Within the first 24 hours, 16,000 people viewed his
website and 87 had registered to receive his alerts - although up to 40 percent
of Syria was reportedly experiencing power outages at the time. Two satellite
television stations also signed up for alerts. Some Syrians have already
registered from abroad to track impending attacks on their hometowns and alert
their families.
Reactions posted on Othman's social media pages range from joy to
disbelief.
"Thank God," typed one fan over and over.
"The idea is great but this is a luxury," wrote another
from Aleppo. "Most people here in Syria do not have communications or
sometimes power and will never get these warnings."
Othman believes that forces loyal to President Bashir al-Assad
have not fired a SCUD at civilians since a June 20 SCUD-D was fired at Aleppo
at 11:45 p.m. from al Qalamon in the Damascus countryside. But when the next
SCUD goes up, Othman is confident that his text messages will reach some people
before the missile.
Syrians by the thousand are already risking their lives to
document the war, material that may eventually provide rich evidence for war
crimes prosecutions. Never have so many atrocities been chronicled so
thoroughly for the networked world to view online. Yet this unprecedented
crowd-sourced documentation effort has not had the desired effect of deterring
atrocities.
Both government forces and rebel groups have committed war crimes
and horrific abuses against civilians are a near-daily occurrence -- though the
behavior of the Syrian government forces has been worse than that of the
rebels, according to the latest report to the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Syrian authorities typically cut off cellphone and internet
service prior to an attack, but even so, civilians are often the last to know
what is about to befall them. It's not clear that Syrian civilians have been
able to make much practical use of the torrent of YouTube videos and detailed
military and atrocity reports that have been posted - unless one considers such
citizen reporting to have helped millions of Syrians make a better-informed
choice to run for their lives. At least 1.7 million have fled to
Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon.
In Syria, most of the casualties from missile attacks are caused
by buildings collapsing onto people. Othman says merely instructing people to
run out into the street or into a basement would increase the odds of survival.
SCUDs are among the slowest of missiles, and in theory, a few minutes' warning
should be enough, especially if activists in the target zones rig up local
public address systems to sound air raid sirens when Aymta sends a warning.
But can it be done without the Syrian government tracking down the
organizers and killing them?
Aymta is part of a growing movement among by idealistic
"hacktivists" to deploy advanced technologies for peace-building. A
13-year-old Israeli developed an iPhone app called Color Red that
sounds an alarm based on data from the Israeli Defense Forces about incoming
missile fire from Gaza. The distance from launch to target is so short that
citizens have as little as 15 seconds to take cover. Even so, the app has been
downloaded at least 130,000 times.
In the annals of self-defense, though, Aymta is a novel hybrid: a
citizen-run self-defense network that depends both on intense secrecy to
protect those putting valuable military information in, and on openness and
publicity, since anyone may get the free alerts and broadcast them to others.
Aymta's secure reporting systems recognize that Syrian cellphones
and internet traffic are monitored. The Syrian government has proved adept at
infiltrating opposition computers, including in one case building malware into a
piece of circumvention software that was supposed to let opposition forces evade government surveillance.
Wary of such traps, Othman has equipped a group of trusted
civilian monitors with hardened digital communication technologies that allow
them to transmit information from a variety of sources, including visual
sightings of SCUD launches and other reliable information, into a well-defended
computer network.
"We are doing our best to deliver 99 percent security,"
said Othman.
There is no such thing as a "100 percent secure"
computer network, only one that is engineered to be difficult to penetrate,
said Ian Schuler, a former State Department specialist in internet freedom and
security digital technologies, now at the nonprofit New Rights Group. "Anything
can be cracked." By Saturday, the Syrian regime had apparently found
Aymta, judging by the large cyber-attack that took down the site for 20
minutes. Othman had expected such a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack
and is trying to speed up his defenses. He studied information technology at
American University of Beirut, then got a job in Iraq working on rebuilding
government communications systems. When he returned to Syria to visit his
family, he was arrested and tortured for a week, suffering beatings with
electric cables. Why? "Just because," said Othman. Among other
things, his interrogators wanted to know whom the young Kurd had met in Iraq,
and whether he knew any Americans.
In a bizarre twist, just months after his release from jail,
Othman was drafted into the Syrian army, sent to artillery training school, and
was eventually assigned to perform tech duties for an artillery unit, where he
saw his first SCUDs. After discharge, he worked for the Syrian Center for Media
and Freedom of Expression until his boss, noted journalist and lawyer Mazen
Darwish, was arrested.
Still, Jeffrey Lewis, a missile expert following the Syrian
conflict at the Monterey Institute for Strategic Studies, who has advised
Othman on the project, is worried both about Othman's own safety and the
potential for mass arrests by the Syrian regime of anyone near a SCUD base.
"I don't want to know how you know your spotters," Lewis
told Othman. "You need to make sure your spotters don't know one another
and one person doesn't know multiple spotters."
"It's built on trust," Othman replied. He is in contact
with opposition coordinators in Syria who know and trust one another. He has
applied for asylum protection in the United States and has decided to use his
real name for the project. "If I will not use my real name, people will
not trust this," he said.
If Aymta works, it could save lives. It could also energize the
new generation of activists trying to harness advanced technologies to lessen
the power imbalance between repressive, well-armed governments and their
unarmed but well-networked citizens.
This attempt at asymmetric peace-fare may also offer Syrians who
have been attacked by their own government a sense that they can do something,
however limited, to control their fates.
But even if Aymta works, it won't tip the military balance of the
war, which is now tilting in Assad's favor. And there is no app for car bombs,
for militias that have surrounded towns and massacred residents, for sarin gas,
artillery or bombs tossed from helicopters. All of these tactics have
terrorized unarmed Syrians.
Civilians in war zones have a right to collective self-defense,
but can rarely exercise that right in high-tech modern warfare. President
Obama's newly announced lethal aid to the Syrian rebels includes small arms and
undefined intelligence-sharing, but does not include PATRIOT anti-missile
batteries or any anti-air defenses that would help rebels shoot down incoming SCUDs or other
missiles. Nor can the shoulder-fired missiles supplied by Qatar shoot down SCUDs.
The Aymta software automatically calculates the trajectory and
likely arrival time of the missile. The more data it receives about where and
when attacks are imminent, the more its accuracy will improve. Though the U.S.,
Turkey, and other countries may have radar or other data that could warn of
SCUD launches, they don't share, said Lewis. He believes the U.S. should
provide whatever information it can to the residents of Aleppo and other cities
under attack.
Meanwhile, Othman and his partners intend to expand the Aymta
system to warn civilians of other types of threats -- including approaching
tanks, convoys of militia fighters, or other information. Othman plans to share
his open-source software for use by activists in other countries. "This is
not just for Syria," he said. "We believe there are a lot of people
in the world who are in a bad situation like ours."
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