14 DAY TRIAL // The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), one of the leading online privacy watchdogs, is urging companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo! to better secure the accounts of Tunisian activists.
Since the beginning of December, the authoritarian North African nation of Tunisia has been engulfed in violent street riots organized by people unhappy with the social inequality, corruption, poverty and lack of civil liberties in the country.
Bloggers, cyberactivists and dissidents have resorted to sites like Facebook and Twitter to report the brutal police response to the protests that so far, they claim, resulted in the death of at least 50 people.
The official death toll released by the government is 23 and authorities claim that deadly force was used only in self defense. Nevertheless, the country's interior minister was dismissed for mishandling the situation.
There is strong evidence to suggest that the government's Internet Agency which controls the country's Internet gateway has been engaging in mass online surveillance.
Password stealing JavaScript code was injected into the login pages of Gmail, Yahoo!, Facebook and other high profile websites, at a national level.
Phishing attacks where users were served fake versions of these sites for limited periods of time have also been reported.
"Among the compromised accounts are Facebook pages administered by a reporter with Al-Tariq ad-Jadid, Sofiene Chourabi, video journalist Haythem El Mekki, and activist Lina Ben Khenni," EFF's Eva Galperin reports.
Several bloggers, including Hamadi Kaloutcha and Slim Ammamou were arrested after disclosing the government's online surveillance operations.
EFF strongly recommends the use of HTTPS when accessing online accounts from Tunisia. Firefox users can install the HTTPS Everywhere extension to help them with this.
People from Tunisia are also advised to change their passwords if they recently logged onto these services without using HTTPS. Facebook is encouraged to enable HTTPS logins by default for Tunisian users and allow them to use pseudonymous accounts.
"Websites providing services to Tunisian citizens cannot afford to sit on the sidelines while the Tunisian government launches malicious attacks on the privacy of users and censors free expression.
"Facebook, Google, and Yahoo should take [...] concrete steps as quickly as possible to inform and better protect their users," the foundation stresses.