In the literature on social protest, organizations matter principally as mechanisms for coordinating action and mobilizing resources (human and otherwise) through the application of incentives; their impact on social interaction tends to go unnoticed

One day an intelligence officer told him that TAO – a division of NSA hackers – had attempted in 2012 to remotely install an exploit in one of the core routers at a major Internet service provider in Syria, which was in the midst of a prolonged civil war. This would have given the NSA access to email and other Internet traffic from much of the country. But something went wrong, and the router was bricked instead – rendered totally inoperable. The failure of this router caused Syria to suddenly lose all connection to the Internet.

In Syria all backhaul for cell networks is done on IP and … we were able to notice all IP infrastructure went down in Syria. That means the cell networks did not go down because the physical layer went dark, but because the IP layers stopped functioning (core routers were off, and DNS was down).