14 DAY TRIAL // The Facebook security team enforced the friend identification security check in order to prevent the Tunisian government from abusing the accounts it hijacked from activists.
The recent civil protests that led to the fleeing of Tunisian dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from the country were supported through real-time information exchange on social media sites.
With YouTube and other video sharing sites banned by the Tunisian Internet Agency, which controls the country's perimeter routers, people took refuge on Facebook.
The social networking site quickly became the primary place for sharing videos of the protests, posting calls to action and relaying the latest news from the streets.
In response, the Tunisian government, which didn't want people expressing their dissenting views freely, launched a mass scale Facebook account hijacking effort.
People were systematically redirected to phishing sites, HTTPS connections were blocked, and password stealing code was injected into the login pages of major websites.
After Tunisian bloggers began being arrested, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the leading digital rights watchdog groups, urged Google, Yahoo! and Facebook to keep Tunisian accounts secure.
According to a report from the Atlantic, Facebook was already actively fighting the problem at the time. "In this case, we were confronted by ISPs that were doing something unprecedented in that they were being very active in their attempts to intercept user information," said Facebook's Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan.
To counter it, Facebook's security team began rerouting all requests from Tunisian IP addresses to the HTTPS version of the site, therefore forcing people to use encrypted connections.
In addition, all Tunisian users were asked to verify their account when logging back in after a known attack. The process involved solving so called social CAPTCHAs, where people have to identify their friends in photographs.
But, while this shows Facebook's commitment to protect users against spying attempts from governments, the social network is still not willing to allow activists to use pseudonyms, like the EFF and other groups have suggested.
Sullivan said that this would be against the company's stated goal of providing a place where real people interact using their real identities.