humanitarian.info

The Humanitarian Futures blog asks:

What if the humanitarian expulsion from Darfur also involved sophisticated efforts to cripple aid groups at their core, vis-a-vis target denial of service attacks?

They already were. When I looked at connectivity in Darfur for the ECB Information and Technology Requirements Assessement, it was clear that the government was pulling mobile and internet communications whenever there were “security actions” taking place in the region. Aid agencies (and everybody else) would be disconnected for days, sometimes weeks – and nobody seemed to be that bothered by it. Unfortunately the human tendency to habituate to new situations meant that the more often this happened, the less people were bothered by it. In some environments, it doesn’t take an army of hackers to have a serious impact, just some bloke in the Ministry of Telecommunications with his finger on the lightswitch.