Ok, I have been in this country (Tunisia) for two months now, and I am convinced that the government here is controlling the internet in the country. However I can’t really see how it can be done. I can go to certain websites and they load very quickly. For example I can load The New York Times very quickly, but The Wall Street Journal can take over ten minutes. Since arriving here my yahoo mail account can not be accessed in under 5 minutes. The page eventually loads but I have to wait forever. I can connect to instant messaging via Yahoo messenger (which none of my friends use, but my girlfriend does) but I can not get AIM to connect and have not since arriving here. I can't even use AIM express, the status indicator just sits on complete for hours.

Is this even remotely possible? Am I crazy?

What kind of configuration would be needed to monitor that much information, and where in the route could it be done from? I can’t doing anything about it, but I’m hella-curious.

It is entirely possible technically that this could be done. At the ISP you could easily make access to certain sites slower.

For this to happen though the government would either have to run all the ISP services for the country or be able to dictate how they operated. I have no idea whether this particular government wields this sort of power internally.

There could just as easily be a non-sinister explanation. Different websites get there connectivity via different ISPs. It is entirely possible that the traffic for some of the sites is just being routed via a much slower link because of this.

Edit:

Looks like the Tunisian government do censor Internet access.

http://www.indexonline.org/news/20020703_tunisia.shtml

"The government has announced an ambitious plan to provide connections to 800,000 subscribers and the BBC reports that in early 2001, the number of internet users was estimated at around 100,000.

But only two internet service providers can serve private users, both are run by people with close ties to the family of President Ben Ali."

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Internet%20censorship%20in%20Tunisia

"Tunisia has blocked thousands of websites (such as pornography, mail, and translation services) and peer-to-peer and FTP transfer. [Technically, the filtering is made via a transparent proxy and the ports 23, 80, 1080, 3128 and 8080 are blocked.]"

I would love to dig into it, but I don't think that is a good idea for someone in my position. I have plans to leave here in December and I would like to keep those plans.

When I type email messages and things to this board I often omit certian words. I don't know if the government weilds that sort of power of not, I don't really want to find out, but I would like to know it's not all in my mind. The last president was elected in a 99% majority, so I don't know what resources are avaliable.

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ports 23, 80, 1080, 3128 and 8080 are blocked

that's why I can't connect to AIM! It makes sense now.

Try comparing traceroutes between the slow and the fast sites. I'd think that if they wanted to censor something, they'd block it altogether as opposed to just slowing it down. I'm guessing that the specific problem you reported at the top of the thread is unrelated to censorship.

I think they don't just slow it down. I think they filter it.

I wonder if I should run trace routes?

There isn't a way to monitior if your being monitored, is there?

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There isn't a way to monitior if your being monitored, is there?

Nope. Be good!