Front Burner - How Yemen's cyberwar could shape future conflicts

Episode Date: January 18, 2019

Yemen's brutal civil war has produced the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet, with thousands dead and millions facing starvation. But there's another dimension to the conflict - the battle over who controls the country's internet. CBC technology reporter Matthew Braga explains how that conflict could influence future wars.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Matthew Braga, and this is Frontburner. Jamie's out sick today.

It took a long time for the world to give Yemen's civil war and humanitarian crisis the attention it deserved. Thousands of civilians have been killed. 14 million people are facing starvation. Yemen is like Syria without cameras. We're talking about children dying every six to ten minutes. One of the biggest tragedies of the 21st century, the worst humanitarian situation that we face. But there's another side of the crisis in Yemen that deserves scrutiny. The civil war has also marked the beginning of what some are calling a new frontier of cyber warfare, the brutal fight for control of the country's internet.

Jamie and I talked earlier in the week, and we'll break this story down today. This is FrontBurner. Hi, Matt. Hi, Jamie. It's so nice to have you back by very popular demand, I should say. I do what the people ask of me. You are becoming a real friend of the podcast. Here's where I want to start today.

What does it mean to have control over a country's internet during a civil war? Very simple question right off the bat. Very, very simple question. Well, I think the thing you have to consider is that in other countries and in a lot of countries, access to the internet isn't like the way it is here, right? It's not like you just kind of sign up with Bell or Rogers or Telus and you go on your merry way. If you don't like one, you jump to the other. No, in other countries, the internet is often a national ISP. There's a national ISP controlled by the government. And there's a lot of sort of overlap between what this ISP does and what the government does in such a way that the government can basically use its control over

that ISP, the fact that they have a national ISP that exists by their hand to sort of do their bidding in a way, right? So, you know, maybe this government decides that it doesn't want people using WhatsApp or iMessage and it starts to block those apps, right? Maybe for a little while, maybe temporarily, maybe during times of unrest, of strife, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe they start blocking websites of people who are critical of the government, political opponents. Maybe they decide that they want to shut down the internet for a whole day in a city. Like maybe a day of protest. I remember this when I was in Egypt during the Egyptian revolution. The government had shut off the internet, which essentially stopped people being able to communicate, to organize, to protest against the government.

One of the uprising's main architects, Wael Ghanem, says Mubarak's decision to block Facebook turned out to be a strategic error. They forced everyone who was just, you know, waiting to read the news on Facebook, they force them to go to the street to be part of this. Yeah. And, you know, you have really serious examples like that. And then you also have just seemingly banal reasons, like countries like Iraq basically shutting down the internet during student exam time so that students won't cheat. Like it's countries will go to great lengths to control what their citizens can and can't do with the internet. Today, we're talking about the case of Yemen, how the warring factions in that civil war have been using the internet to further their goals. And before we talk about how the internet is being used in this war, I just want to lay out a 101 of the conflict there. Sure.

So this conflict began in 2011 after the Arab Spring. There were all of these protests there against the Saleh government. And he was eventually toppled. After 33 years, like a longtime strongman leader, very contentious, and finally toppled as a result of these protests. And it unlocked, I remember, all of this instability in the country. And the Houthis, which were this group who had previously fought the Saleh government and actually gotten stronger because of it, they essentially took advantage of this instability. And then allied with the ousted president, Saleh. Yes, which is bizarre. Yes, exactly. gotten stronger because of it. They essentially took advantage of this instability. And then allied with the ousted president, Saleh. Yes, which is bizarre.

Yes, exactly. The Houthi Revolutionary Committee with Saleh's GPC party have formed a 10-member Supreme Council. It's being seen as an attempt to legitimize Houthi rule. After Saleh is ousted, his former vice president, this guy named Abdur-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, takes over. And they think that Saleh is going to go away quietly. Of course, he doesn't. And instead, he aligns with this rebel group that's been fighting against his government. Now they're fighting against the Hadi government. And just in the aftermath and the chaos of the Arab Spring, it just only made stronger, right?

This what used to be a fringe group, by all accounts, amasses quite a bit of power, takes over a lot of territory. And by 2014, 2015, they take over the capital of Sana'a. We will not stop until the last beat of our hearts, until the last drop of our blood. Women, men, and children will fight. And we should mention that the Houthis are backed by Iran. Yep. And Saudi Arabia, they have backed the Hadi government. Yes.

And this is the government that we just talked about, that the Houthis threw out of the capital. And so this has turned into a proxy war, essentially. The U.S., the U.K., and France have also been giving logistical and intelligence support to the Hattie government, to the Saudi backed Hattie government. And that's been a bit of a contentious issue as well for folks in the U.S. Because, I mean, if you look at what's been happening in the country, massive humanitarian crisis, both sides involved in all sorts of what international groups basically amount to war crimes. Right. There's torture. There's forced detentions, massive famine, there's starvation. This is the most serious humanitarian crisis in the world. Yeah, the UN says like 75% of the country, which is 24 million people, are currently in need of assistance. At least 16,000 civilians killed.

We continue to witness a total disregard of the suffering of the people of Yemen. Malnutrition and disease are killing more than 100 children every day, according to aid agencies. Dozens of tiny graves dug for the victims of the Saudi coalition airstrike. A secret network of secret prisons in the south of the country, where detainees are subjected to brutal abuse and torture. This crisis has reached its peak with no apparent sight of light at the end of the tunnel. It is indeed a forgotten crisis. So let's move on to the role that the internet is playing in all of this.

When the Houthis took over Yemen's capital, Sanaa, what did they do when it comes to the internet? When the Houthis move into the capital, they get control over all of the ministries. They get control over all of the government departments, all of the buildings, and also all of the infrastructure that's in place there. or all of the government departments, all of the buildings, and also all of the infrastructure that's in place there. So in Yemen, Yemen is one of these countries where internet access in Yemen is – it's this national ISP. You've got YemenNet, which is their main ISP, and then you've got TeleYemen, which is their cellular carrier, all controlled by the government, all run out of Sana. So when the Houthis come into Sana, they take over these national ISPs, these national networks.

We've certainly seen cases in the past where rebel groups come in and they immediately take over a country's airwaves. They take over a country's radio stations and TV stations. They clamp down on journalists and on and on. What's interesting about this is that not only do they come in and they take over the internet and the infrastructure that's in place, but they're able to actually leverage all of the controls the former government put in place as well. Because the Saleh government and then for a brief time, the Hadi government was also using the internet for its own ends. So what we're seeing in Yemen, of course, is happening in this really unprecedented way. I was at this conference in November.

It was called Cyber War Con. And there I saw these researchers from this cyber threat intelligence firm called Recorded Future and they talked about what they had been observing in Yemen in the country over the past few years. One of the co-authors of this report in particular, this threat intelligence analyst named Alan Liska, he recently walked me through some of their findings. I interviewed him in our studio here and this is what he had to say. findings. I interviewed him in our studio here, and this is what he had to say. Overall, Yemen's got a relatively low adoption rate of internet access. So about 24% of the population as of the end of 2017 had access to the internet. And it's heavily censored. They have the ability to filter out, obviously, sites they find objectionable or even, again, specific articles they find objectionable. But they also have the ability to just cut off

access entirely to parts of the country. So they can switch a router off, cut a cable, and block that part of the country from gaining any sort of access. And slowly they've gained control not just of landline connections but also mobile connections. Matt, how are the people in Yemen responding to this government control of the internet? So what often happens when you have governments cracking down on what people can access, whether it be sort of the apps they can use, whether it be the websites they can access, things like that,

you see people flock to what's called like circumvention tools, right? So you can use, people are probably familiar with VPNs, virtual private networks, these apps and things that you can install, which a lot of people in the West use to, or at least used to use to access, you know, US Netflix. Another thing to keep in mind is that even for people who know how to use circumvention

software and who are doing this sort of stuff, they also kind of face other challenges. And this is sort of a broader kind of thing happening in Yemen right now, where the government isn't just able to exercise software-based controls, right? They're not just using software to control people's access to information and control access to the internet. They're also doing really sort of blunt kind of heavy-handed types of things, right? So for example, by tightly controlling electricity, tightly controlling access to fuel and generators, you just deprive people of the ability to even power their modems in the first place, right? Or charge their electronics. Some people can't even get on the internet because they just don't have power to do so,

right? For a while as well, YemenNet, again, it's this national ISP. It's the only kind of game in town, more or less. And it used to be serviced in the country by, there's four submarine cable landing sites in the country. And what the Houthis have done over the years, there's been these news reports that have pointed to the fact that the Houthis have gone and started to slice through some of these cables and some of these cable points to the point where there's basically one submarine cable that

connects Yemen net to the rest of the world. And if that submarine cable suddenly goes down because of fighting and contested regions, I mean, what happens, right? So there's things that they've done to really kind of centralize their control and make it such that they are able to really exercise how and when and in which way people access the internet. We talked earlier about how this country is in the throes of a humanitarian crisis, that there are millions of people starving. There are mass killings. How has the Internet played into these horrible humanitarian issues that are happening on the ground?

If you look at what governments and rebel groups have done in other countries in the past, right, you see them seizing control of television stations, of radio stations, shutting down newspapers, jailing and killing journalists. And I think this fits within that sort of approach to information controls, right? is a way in which not only people in countries like Yemen are able to get information, both from regional sources, but also from international sources. But it's also a way for them to get information out. And I think by having the Houthis curtailing that access by just forcibly shutting down the connections, by sawing through cables, right, by doing what they can to just disrupt people's ability to access this, they're also limiting the ability for people, I think, within Yemen who are really being hardest hit by these atrocities to bear witness to the world, right, to be able to get

that message out to folks. The Hadi government, so they've lost control of the capital to the Houthis. They've lost control of Sanaa. And they've now set up shop in a city called Aden. If the Houthis control the internet in the country, then does the Hathi government in Aden have any way to communicate or get their message out? You have the country's main internet provider under Houthi control. The Houthis control the city where the internet leaves and enters the country. They control the main kind of submarine cable spot. And that gives the Houthis a lot of power, right?

If you, as the Hadi government, want to do sensitive government business, if you want to be able to communicate with your troops, with your forces, like, are you going to rely on a hostile controlled internet to do so? And so what the Hadi government has done is they have actually just gone ahead and started up their own internet service providers. They, recognizing that they can't really trust YemenNet and TeleYemen, probably don't want to be paying for YemenNet or TeleYemen because that's just money that they're literally paying to their enemies, has gone ahead and started up their own ISP called AdenNet. And they haven't just done this on their own. They've done this with Saudi backing.

They're using infrastructure from the Chinese company Huawei. They're not using any of the country's submarine cables. Instead, they've run these sort of overland fiber connections into Saudi Arabia that way. The natural question that flows from that for me is how important is it for the Houthi government to maintain control of the internet in Sana'a? So obviously, the position that they're in gives them immense ability to control what people read, how they're able to communicate. They control the government buildings. They control the ministries.

And what's interesting is as part of this, they also control Yemen's top-level domain. And what that means is in Canada, for example, our top-level domain is.ca. Everyone's familiar with.com. That's a top-level domain..gov is a top-level domain top level domain is.ca. Everyone's familiar with.com. That's a top level domain. .gov is a top level domain. Yemen's is.ye. And that's what all the government websites run on. And when the Houthis took over control of the telecommunications ministry, when they took control of the ISPs, they also got control of.ye.

Here's what Alan Liskett, Recorded Future, had to say about the implications of that. of.ye. Here's what Alan Lisk at Recorded Future had to say about the implications of that. Essentially legitimize the Houthi government by taking control of those government websites and providing those government services. So now the Houthi government's not internationally recognized, the Haiti government still is, but the Haiti government doesn't have access to those websites to be able to control and list themselves as the government, you know, as people who control the government. So it's in sort of a propaganda way, it's an interesting way of establishing yourself as the official leaders or credible leaders of the country by saying, yeah, see, we own the website and here's our,

you know, our commander as the president and so on. Matt, earlier we talked about how governments have used the internet for their own means. So Egypt during the Arab revolution by turning the internet off and preventing protesters from organizing. But have we ever seen anything like this before, a battle for the internet used in a civil war like this? So certainly we've seen internet filtering software used in the past. We've seen countries use malware in the past, right? Targeted surveillance against their citizens, all sorts of blocks on particular apps and sites and things like that. That's kind of pretty common, I think, for the playbook of a

lot of sort of repressive regimes and autocratic regimes in the world nowadays. But you're right, this idea of a civil war playing out, not just on sort of the physical realm within a country, but also in, you know, for lack of a better word, cyberspace to some degree, right? You have these two factions fighting over control of the country's internet and the legitimacy that confers. Certainly, according to some of the folks that we spoke with, that's new, right? That is a new development. And that was something that Alan Liska, he described it as unprecedented. We've never seen anything like this before. We do think it's going to be a model for other civil wars that may happen in the future. I think what we're starting to see here is a blueprint for how cyber war is

going to impact internal strifes in other countries. I'm sure that wasn't the way the Houthi regime intended it to be, but it turns out that it may be a good way for rebellious forces to gain legitimacy within a country. And we may see more of that going forward. What does this say about the power and influence of the Internet and sort of the future of cyber warfare, which is what we're talking about today, cyber warfare. For decades, regimes and governments have fought for control over television stations and radio stations and newspapers and cracked down on journalists and just content critical of the government.

Right. I mean, this isn't a new concept. The Rwandan genocide was propelled by controlling radio airwaves. Yeah. And this certainly is a new tool in that sort of repressive toolkit, so to speak. Right. You know, you get control of the TV stations, the radio stations, the newspapers and now the Internet, because a lot of this, a lot of the criticism, a lot of the critics, a lot of the discourse that's happening is happening online and not just within those countries, right? It's not just regional networks and sources that are talking about the stuff. It's people all over the world who are able to sort of beam their critical thoughts or

their sort of criticism of the government into the country. And it works the other way as well, where people can get within the country, can have their voices heard around the world. But it's also worth noting as well that like we're thinking about this in terms of communication. But I think the even bigger picture way to look at this is that the internet isn't just a tool for communication, right? Like the internet, when you think about how it's used in Western society and a lot of

parts of the world, underpins so much of what we do day to day, right? It is the glue that holds together our transit system, our financial systems, right? Commerce as we know it. Like just so many different parts of day to day life now rely on the internet and that's increasingly the case in other parts of the world. increasingly the case in other parts of the world. And for a rebel group to gain control of that, there must be some recognition of the fact that like this plays a big role in society now, and we have to have some control over this, right? It's to the point where I think, and you're seeing that in some of the research that we've been talking about here, and even just in some of the discussion that we've been having that now you have rebel groups come in and they're

taking over the food, they're taking over the water, they're taking over the electricity, they're controlling the population, taking over the government and then also taking over the Internet because the Internet underpins all of this. Right. It would be foolish for for folks not to pay attention to that now. And I think that's exactly why you're seeing that here and exactly why folks like Alan and and his colleagues at Recorded Future are doing this kind of research. and his colleagues at Recorded Future are doing this kind of research. Matt, I think that final thought is why everyone keeps wanting you to come back on the podcast. Thank you. Anytime, Jamie. That's all for today.

I'm Matthew Braga, here for Jamie Poussin. FrontBurner comes to you from CBC News and CBC Podcasts. The show is produced by Chris Berube, Elaine Chao, Shannon Higgins, and Robert Parker, with help from Aisha Barmania. Derek Vanderwyk does our sound design. Special thanks this week to Sylvia Thompson and Yasmeen Hassan. Our music is by Joseph Chabison from Boombox Sound. The executive producer of Front Burner is Nick McCabe-Locos. Thanks for listening.

For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog. She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was, please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle and you can't put it back. Gay Girl Gone. Available now.