They've been blocking traffic in Syria to numerous social networking and email/voip sites since the revolution began, and nulling cell towers in every area where there are protests. This hasn't hampered the free syrian army or activists as since last year they've been passing sdcards to the border of lebanon, jordan, iraq and turkey and uploading their videos wirelessly from there. The FSA is running two border crossing with turkey anyways.
This seems to be like some sort of incompetence, more like they tried to set up some sort of spying choke point and it massively failed. ask nokia-siemens, they helped iran set up their chokepoint, most likely some infosec whitehats with zero ethics are currently flying out there to assist in the holocaust, er I mean rebellion put down, by working with Assad to get the tubes back up.
It only hurts Assad to keep the tubes out, his loyal base needs to buy their louis vuitton bags off alibaba to keep their minds off the constant public shooting of protesters and shelling of entire cities full of "terrorists"
Well, Syria already does have a spying chokepoint in place. It's had it for years(at least since late 2010 when I was there). They have something similar to China's in that it also does filtering. Also, at some point when I was there around may~june 2011 when this was all starting up they seriously started messing with https stuff conducting MITM on facebook and what not.
Also, no, having the internet cut off absolutely does not hurt Assad. Syria is very sectarian in nature. In other words your loyal base absolutely does not correlate with what services you provide, only what religion/sect/tribe people are.
The rebellion didn't happen because people suddenly started hating Bashar el Assad, it happened because those same people have hated this regime for at least the past 40 years. In 1982, Hafez, the guy who established the regime put down an earlier rebellion that had gone on for something like 3 years by completely destroying entire sections of cities(and pretty much all of Hama) and killing, by conservative estimates, at least 10,000 people. This was during a time when the USSR still existed and where such things within its sphere of influence were par for the course, which is why no international response happened at the time.
The rebellion happened now because of a perceived weakness in the regime's freedom to act(no USSR anymore, much more US influence in the area, weak(er) dictator) and because of perceived international support for similar things happening in Arab nations. That's it. So if the internet in any way helps the FSA get international support by exposing atrocities committed against civilians by the government then you can bet it's in the government's best interest to shut it down.
This seems to be like some sort of incompetence, more like they tried to set up some sort of spying choke point and it massively failed. ask nokia-siemens, they helped iran set up their chokepoint, most likely some infosec whitehats with zero ethics are currently flying out there to assist in the holocaust, er I mean rebellion put down, by working with Assad to get the tubes back up.
It only hurts Assad to keep the tubes out, his loyal base needs to buy their louis vuitton bags off alibaba to keep their minds off the constant public shooting of protesters and shelling of entire cities full of "terrorists"