Supposedly, it was actually the NSA, not the Syrian government, that cut Syria off from the Internet in 2012:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ot-assad-took-syria-off-the-internet-in-2012/
Interesting, as Assad blocking access certainly seemed plausible. But at this point, Snowden has a lot more credibility than the NSA. And they've certainly been shown to have essentially no limits, what with spying on Merkel, physically tapping the wires between Google and Yahoo servers to get what they couldn't otherwise, etc. So trying to gain more access to the communications of a country in civil war and accidentally screwing up? Wouldn't be very far out of the ordinary.
See also, why the software company I'm working for is doing well in international contracts. We're an American company, but willing to do on-site installs. So there's been multiple potential customers in countries outside the U.S. that will consider us, but won't consider our competitors who are cloud-only.
Of course, it'd be better if our contact people set the price so that the increased maintenance of on-site customers was reflected properly. But nonetheless, it's interesting to see the competitive advantage versus other American companies. While some of those potential customers wouldn't have considered cloud solutions even before the NSA revelations (foreign governments in particular), some of them likely would have before then.
![[party]](/images/smilies/partytime.gif "Party [party]")
