Recent US military operations in Venezuela have led to the removal of Venezuelan president Maduro and subsequent proceedings here in New York where Maduro was brought to just the other day for legal proceedings in US courts. Of course, there has been global reaction, the installment of an interim government along with the sense of unrest among some, and certainly an impact on the delivery of utilities such as power and Internet access.
With us today is Andres Azpurua, originally from Venezuela, and a returning guest of Telemetry Now who is intimately aware of the situation as we speak. And he'll be giving us his firsthand observations of the situation.
Also joining me is Doug Madory, Kentik's Director of Internet Analysis, with his own observations from his vantage point of connectivity in the region. And my name is Philip Gervasi, and this is Telemetry Now.
Andres, thank you so much for joining us again this morning.
It's a pleasure.
Before we get started, would you give us a quick understanding, quick overview of what you and your organization does?
I'm Andres Azpurua, Executive Director of Connexion Seuruli Libre or Free and Secure Online. It's a digital rights organization from Caracas, from Venezuela. And we do documentation and we work against internet censorship, surveillance, and other threats to human rights on the internet or facilitated by technology. And we help support address communities, journalists, human rights defenders, civil society organizations from some of those threats as well. We're mostly known for which is our documentation project on all those issues. So we monitor connectivity, shutdowns, censorship, and and many more.
Andres, if I could, so you are you lead a digital rights organization that's been focused on connectivity in Venezuela, censorship, other other types of connectivity issues, would you you know, before setting aside what took place on Saturday, would you just level set us? Like, what what's what's the state of of the infrastructure?
I think we we've had you on before. You described, you know, where we're at. So why why don't you just where where we'd be starting with before all the recent events took place?
So the baseline connectivity in Venezuela is something that is in some parts similar to other developing countries.
And it's a different experience definitely from developed countries where you can rely on the internet to be there all the time or the power to be there all the time. So a common issue in Venezuela is that problems with infrastructure due to lack of investment or maintenance leads to people get disconnected from the Internet without any intentionality precisely on that specific moment. You can argue and I definitely definitely argue that lack of investment in maintenance and making systems more resilient is a policy decision that has that specific impact on the population. But in general, it's not like every single time the power goes out or every single time the internet goes out is because of a political or policy decision to just cut the internet out and shut the internet.
However, Venezuela does have significant censorship.
It's very, very widespread. So it's implemented independently by each individual ISP. However, it's coordinated and mandated by the telecom regulator. So the equivalent of the FCC in Venezuela is ordering the ISPs to implement the censorship, which includes basically the whole ecosystem of independent news media in Venezuela, also includes social networking apps such as X. It has included at different points TikTok and YouTube and Facebook and Instagram.
And it also includes blocking of apps such as signal.
It has they have blocked in the past telegram. And it's not even independent local media is getting blocked. Like, whenever you see like significant coverage from, let's say, the Washington Post or the New York Times, those tend to be triggers for also getting blocked, even if they are an English language, or they don't have primarily Spanish or Venezuelan audience. So you also see like regional Spanish language or international English language outlets also getting blocked.
What typically happens is does the page the page just not load or do you get a So yeah, the page will just not load most most of the time.
So more technically you could say that sometimes the DNS records will not get anything. So DNS resolution will just fail. Sometimes it's little bit funny, but sometimes you get a loopback address as the DNS response. So it's like if you're a web developer, you're like, I don't know, testing a local website, but you also try to access a blocked website.
And then you get the website you're running locally. That's what will load with a different domain because on the DNS, you get a look back address. So it's your own server on your own computer that you're watching. But most obviously that's just a funny edge case for developers.
What does happen is that you don't get a website.
Sometimes we also see IP address blocks. And we also see DPI based internet blocking. So they check the packages and say, oh, this is the HTTP host or this is the SNI on their TLS handshake, and that's what triggers the block.
So I know just from looking into this many years in the past, and maybe you and I were talking about this many years ago, that, you know, some of these blockages we're describing, a lot of it is political. Like, it's political, independent journalism beholding politicians to account kind of thing. There's also a strain of blocking around any sites that we report on exchange rates from the black market.
Would you would you comment on that Sure, so we have been documenting this censorship for over a decade.
And you can see like what's the point that has the more sensitive point or the more sensitive topic for the government at different points. So at one time was definitely the black market exchange rate. And then eventually became more like satirical news websites and eventually became the mainline news website and eventually was social media and live streaming services. And then it turned, it went the whole way back around and now and at some point returned to also like currency exchanges and and apps that let you pay with foreign currency and exchange currencies.
Would you explain that?
What's what is it that's why why do they need to block the exchange rate information?
So for the longest time in Venezuela, to control the economy and to change the perception on how the economy is going, Venezuela has tried to set up a specific exchange rates of the local currency against the dollar. So it's like, oh, this is how much a dollar is worth if you have the only local currency. And that affects the whole of the economy, especially an economy that over the years have lost their production capacity. So their imports are a bigger share of their what we eat, what we buy, what we just get from everywhere.
So what that change rate is extremely important for the economy. It also sets people expectations and outlook on economy itself. So controlling that both as an economic tool and as a perception issue is super important. And at different times, they have also set up specific rates that are just cheaper for specific imports or for specific things.
And all of that create a lot of dysregulation on the economy and people who need money, need to exchange funds, but cannot exchange it at the official place or don't have access to those hard to get special rates that you can get from the government, then you have to exchange the money somehow anyways.
And that's, you need a reference point and those like websites, and then apps, and then like social media accounts became like those reference points. And what people can trade among themselves irregularly those currency exchanges. It's super funny or interesting because in Venezuela, despite all the rhetoric, if you go to Caracas, what people exchange is dollars. Like if you go to supermarket, you'll like the ticket, the receipt is in local currency.
But on the aisles, you'll see reference price. And that reference price, everyone knows it's just masking for a dollar sign. Oh, it's reference price nine. That just means nine dollars Then you have to see, oh, but it's nine dollars But at a specific exchange rate on the establishment, but if this change rate goes up and down, then you don't have to be changing, I don't know, three times a day or every day the sticker on the aisle.
You have a reference price in US dollars and then you pay either in local currency at one of the specifics change rates and now that would get too complicated for this podcast. And and or you pay in in in foreign currency.
Alright. That that's good. I think that helps helps us get a a little window into the chaos of, you know, day to day life in in Venezuela. So maybe let's bring up to current events here. So we have this operation that takes place on Saturdays. It's just a couple days ago.
I guess I I would I'll just say what little I saw.
So I also saw the news, jumped on a computer, ping people were pinging me as well. Like, hey. What are we what are we seeing here? I guess the country as a whole, you know, we have this NetFlow data that, I get to use in in mass from Kentik.
You know, there wasn't like a big signature of, like, a big drop off, a national shutdown kind of thing.
There was some perturbance around o six hundred UTC, is about two AM local. And and then actually, saw kind of a surge in traffic as, you know, the as the morning came and and people were waking up. And I think the way I interpreted that, I think but David Bellson at Cloudflare saw some something similar. They they saw the same thing.
I guess I interpret that as people waking up a little bit in shock of what just took place, going to any tools they've got to find out what's happening or contact loved ones. So usage of the Internet was up on Saturday as in general as people were trying to figure out, you know, what what the heck just happened in their country. I did see a handful of BGP routes go down at about, again, about it's like five fifty eight UTC, so one fifty eight AM local. I think that probably corresponds to the the power outage that took place in Caracas, possibly a US cyber operation.
There was some some insinuation with some of the public statements, but we'll probably never know that for certain. But there was a there was a a power outage. Some of those routes, they're from different providers. Some came back later that day.
Some are still not up, and there's been some subsequent outages. But those are the observations I had. It's not a huge Internet story from where I sit. But, Andres, what what what have you been I mean, know you've been, working on this around the clock, since this took place.
So what are your observations?
May I ask a quick question for you?
Sure, Phil.
And then and then follow-up with Andres because I wanted to piggyback on something you said, Andres, earlier. What you explained was that there's really two things going on. There is a, you know, perhaps a problem with infrastructure and then with the lack of investment, but also a deliberate strategic involvement from the government to censor. And so those two different aspects of affecting internet connectivity and then access to the internet.
And so, Doug, I want to start with a question for you. Is there anything that is in the data that you look at that might infer one type of activity over another? Can we can we can you actually see that kind of thing? Or or, you know, obviously, it's an inference and not a a definite thing.
And then the the follow-up for you, Andres, is what and I think this is where you're going, Doug. What are you actually seeing with regard to, the the changes in interact activity?
I Phil, I've done this for a while that I've learned to be kinda circumspect of what I can Yeah. You know, confidently conclude out of the data without like, I I refer to folks, like, the good folks at that do, you know, the censorship technical measurement from handsets in country. You know, I'm sitting outside the country, so from the outside, it's hard for me to I I think a lot of times outages, like, I think Andre was saying a few minutes ago, you've got poor infrastructure. You also got kind of a government that's not has has reasons to cut off access.
It's I don't think you can confidently just look at an outage and know which one it was Yeah. Without with with some exceptions. Usually, you need some sort of out of band information, some context and stuff, and then you can put it together.
But
Okay.
Yeah.
Andres, you wanna Sure.
Add to that?
Yes. So on the larger scale things, as Doug was saying, there was not a very significant drop in connectivity. And the Kentik data and other data sources show that there's an increase in traffic volumes, which are two different metrics.
One correlates to the number of people connected to the internet. It's not the same to that, but correlates to that. But also correlates to the number of people who have Internet power. Because if you have Internet power, likely your router is not connected to the Internet or your modem is not connecting. So those IP pings are not reaching anyone. So so connectivity dropped a little bit in Caracas, and overall traffic volumes increased.
So for the traffic volumes, yeah, indeed, people woke up in Caracas at two am in the morning with huge explosions. And some were very big and very loud, especially like which is one of the main military bases in the country where Maduro's own residential compound is located inside of.
I mean, that's surrounded by the city. Surrounded by the city through a mountain, surrounded by the city through right next to a highway and to a neighborhood to the other side. It's embedded in the city. It's not like far away. So people are surrounding it.
The small air base in the center of Caracas also surrounded by neighborhoods.
So people were surrounded by these explosions. So everyone woke up very early in the morning, confused about what was happening.
And you will see it took hours for Venezuelan TV to say anything about what was happening. So people were already up for hours. You have on state TV and private twenty four hours news broadcasts.
Always folks ready to cover any breaking news. That's just the business of doing that. But nobody was saying anything. Mean, like they didn't dare to say anything.
I your posts on social media of like they're playing like pirated movies and stuff.
It's a little like the the old the the coup that took place maybe nineteen ninety in the Soviet Union where they're playing the ball the ballet, you know, the I was thinking the same thing.
Nutcracker or whatever. They're playing a Russian ballet on TV while, you know, it's not clear who's in charge of the country.
But Yeah. And nobody and nobody dares to say anything because you don't know that you're sticking your head out when you're, like, reporting the news.
So indeed, like, on state TV, you have, the main state TV, like, showing, like, reruns of propaganda shows, like the National Armed Forces TV channel, which is a weird thing to have anyways, was just showing travel shows and other state TVs, which channels were just showing pirated movies, like American TV or movies just pirated off the internet and they just broadcast that.
It took hours for them to literally say anything until there was a mandatory broadcast from the government that just put everyone on the same signal. It took hours and people were reading like, you're just seeing things. You want to find out what's going on. You already know that state TV and radio and even private TV is not going to say anything that is the truth necessarily.
It will have a huge censorship on its own. So they go online, even if there's a lot of censorship, they go to Twitter, even it's blocked through a VPN and they just try to find out. And there's a lot of live streaming of what's going on, a lot of the videos being shared on social media. I'm sure that definitely increased dramatically from two hours, like two am, three am amount of traffic through to basically a whole city or a whole country just checking the news obsessively on social media, watching the same videos and watching streams.
Yeah, and we could see that data on Kentik, Doug published a graph. There were some other data sources that also showed some of the same metrics. And the drop in connectivity comes from the power outages in parts of Caracas, not the whole of Caracas. And this is some of the metrics.
They're not really huge metrics. It's not something that we report. That's not how it looks when the whole of Caracas has a blackout. That's just when specific parts of Caracas are impacted.
And we saw evidence of kinetic damage, of physical damage to power infrastructure in the city that correlates roughly with power infrastructure and other infrastructure substations, what other like antennas and telecom nodes that could explain the power outages in different parts of Caracas. That's not to say that there were no cyber operations.
I wouldn't know, at least with the data that I have access to. But the power outages correlate with the physical damage to some infrastructure.
Andres, can I ask? It's you know, it hasn't been that long, but are there any changes to the the censorship regime as a is it is it is it just the same thing that are blocked or more things blocked or is it okay.
Is there Over the weekend, it didn't change.
Over the weekend, it didn't change. Which And that which I have some comments on if if you want to hear my opinion.
Well, I was gonna ask.
I mean, I don't wanna ask you to speculate here, but I I think there's, you know, there's a lot of questions in Venezuela and the United States around the world. Like, what is gonna happen here? And, it does seem like the Maduro government is in charge minus Maduro.
So what that means for the Internet is may mean that there's really no change.
I guess that would be the concern that we went through all this effort, and and we're back to where we were prior to Saturday. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Sure. So so yeah. Like, in who is it? Like, in power, the the the interim president is Desiree Rodriguez.
Desiree Rodriguez was Maduro's vice president. Her brother is the head of the National Assembly. So it's basically the head of legislative branch. So basically, I mean, it's the same I mean, it's the same grouping power.
We have no expectation there's gonna be some reversal of Internet censorship, the stuff that you've been documenting for a I don't have any expectations of that.
I was surprised, however, that there was no massive change on Internet censorship on Saturday or on Sunday as a reaction to what happened. I think there was a lot of problems with finding out what was happening or having a plan on how to react to what was happening.
We'll see how different narratives start to spread or not in the country, whether that promotes more censorship.
I would say that policy priorities for the US government have been stated, and they have not mentioned internal censorship or human rights a lot.
So I wouldn't say that I think some of those objectives are also been a bit in flux in the course of this whether this is about drugs or you know Well, would agree. Whatever like I don't wanna get clinical here but Exactly.
That part is not safe as well. But but the but the range of the range of of topics have not Yeah.
They haven't Sorry.
Internet digital rights is not on the list, I think. Exactly.
So so so on that end, I don't see there's a lot of pressure for that to change.
And and as I said, I mean, group in power is the same folks that were in power before. Sure, there are different factions in the Chavismo, in the political movement that Hugo Chavez created, But they have always learned to work together to ensure their own survival, and that seems what's happening right now. So Maduro was taken out, and now have Delsy Rodriguez as interim president. They are sidestepping specific language in the constitution so that they are not mandate so to avoid what should be a mandated election because of the absence of the president. So that just came through the Venezuelan Supreme Court in Saturday at night. And they basically invented a new language just to sidestep those requirements for a new election. So yeah, I don't see any necessarily good indications for significant changes on internal censorship in the short term.
And we'll see what happens. Like if this pro I mean, there's still a lot of things in flux. Many things could still happen that we don't know about.
The reaction from the public has not been taken into account and we have still not seen anything. People were just ensuring they were safe and not sticking their head out in a confusing time for all parties involved. An example of that confusion was yesterday night.
Last night when around the presidential palace, people started reporting and sharing videos of small arms fire towards the sky, some tracers. So I assume like small, medium sized anti air batteries.
I saw that. Was that real?
It was real, but it was just drones. Their own drones. Their own surveillance drones.
Just saw the surveillance drones.
And they didn't know. They just didn't know. They're just confused. There's a lot of like, Edwin's on edge.
There's a lot of miscommunication, different groups involved, some militia that are not formal military, plus military, plus like plus the presidential guard just seeing drones. Not everyone knew what they were. Someone started fighting, everyone started shooting. And eventually, when things settled down, it became clear that it was just their own drones, and they just didn't knew what was happening.
And we'll see how it goes. That's just a sample of the confusion inside the government.
I wanna ask you about something else too. So so Starlink in Venezuela. So there was an announcement in the last day or so that Starlink was gonna offer free Internet service in Venezuela, and then there was, you know, there's, like, this bit of back and forth that I think there's a lot of confusion around this this topic. I know just from working on this for a a piece for Internet Society this year doing an analysis of the geolocation files for Starlink.
So let's see. So a satellite operator, which Starlink is, normally, the way it works, they have to get, like, a frequency clearance from a ITU, international treaty, group that, you know, allows them to have the frequency to radiate. Usually, depending on the country, there's some sort of process to get a license to provide telecommunication services from the the local regulator of the government. And for every satellite operator, whether it's Starlink or UTELSAT or anything, there's usually an availability map on their website of, like, what countries have they cleared all these hurdles and which ones are are not which one are they supposed to irradiate in and when they are now they can technically usually provide service from a technical means everywhere. Like, Starlink can just basically cover the entire planet, but then then there's rules they're supposed to follow.
Now in the case of Starlink, Starlink has been is does not have authorization from the government in Venezuela. I'm not a lawyer, so I can't I can't I don't wanna make a comment, but there are US sanctions against Venezuela that would seem to be complicating any providing service. Having said that, it's been working, fairly wide widespread, and you, you know, you've educated me on this, in in Venezuela for a while. A little bit like how it operates in Iran, again, over the objections of the Iranian government over, you know, no authorization from the ITU.
And, you know, as someone who supports Internet access and freedom, I mean, that's that's a good thing. It's it it there there is some concern around how we how we keep this rules based system going if people don't follow the rules, but, I don't wanna be in a place of defending the Iranian government or the Venezuelan government, either. So, I think I think people are not aware that Starlink is in use already in Venezuela, and maybe you can comment on that. And then, as far as offering free service, I mean, it seems like there's a hurdle of getting the equipment, and that maybe may not be affordable for a lot of people or may not be available.
Certainly, in the last few weeks or months, getting things in and out of Venezuela may be may have become difficult.
And then yeah. I don't know. What do you think of this offer of free a month of free service for Venezuelan customers?
I mean, I don't think it's a bad idea to actually do it.
I also think it's important to to understand, like, who's gonna benefit from that. You you need to already have a a Starlink terminal inside of the country installed, likely already set up with an account with a service plan, most likely already set up, which is not terribly easy.
I have to say one of the first things when I saw the tweet from Elon Musk is like, oh, like, he's gonna get in trouble with the ITU now because he was he he like, he's been, like, mostly saying, oh, but I mean, we're not offering the service in Venezuela, which is true. They're not officially offering the service in Venezuela. Actually, it's not that easy to set up Starlink in Venezuela. On one side, like, it's not offered normally, like, very openly.
And the market is not important to show Why is it difficult in Venezuela?
So on one side, because Starlink is not officially distributing and selling the equipment to Venezuela. So you don't have official distributors or official resellers of the equipment, or you can just get online to their website and just order it and get it into your house.
So you have to buy it from a reseller on the, I would say, gray market initially. So they were like before the presidential elections in twenty twenty four, you would see a lot of advertisements on social media, on billboards even, on hey, get Starlink, have internet access everywhere, internet access even if there's no power, internet, assuming you have a means of giving power a terminal.
Access even if you are in a remote area. You see like those kinds of advertisements from a gray market resellers.
The thing is, after the election that all that stopped, some companies continue to resell those things. But now it's far more black market, far more decisively black market. And we have seen and documented how people have been arrested from smuggling, starting terminals from Colombia to Venezuela, and they have been arrested. And it's very serious charges put to them. Not only like, oh, so I don't know, it's not a hit on the wrist because you imported, I don't know, an orange that was not allowed. It's like, oh, this is a serious, the government's concerned seriously about people importing those terminals. The government uses those terminals as well and you'll see state security forces, I don't know, SUVs with the iconic matte white rectangles on the roof.
You've told me this, I think that's that's an amazing point of, you know, that, the government, has not allowed the service, but you have government services security services relying on Starlink just probably, I'm guessing, be due to the state of, the poor state of infrastructure in the country, this is the best they can get Yeah. Is to use this, you know, verboten service, which is, you know, I I think it it circles back to the craziness of the prices, you know, conversation in the stores of just, like, kinda chaotic aspect of of life in Venezuela.
Yeah. Yeah.
I that that yeah.
Go ahead.
The the equipment is very expensive because Oh, imagine. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's black market.
It's a black market market whatever is the price.
If the price is gonna go up and then the price itself of the service is very expensive compared to other things outside of Venezuela. In Venezuela, the story is more mixed because some regions like Caracas, now you can have a lot of competition on fiber optic services depending on your neighborhood.
And the prices are coming down, but are still high compared to other countries. Like what you get for one hundred megabits per second is expensive compared to other countries.
But also depending on where you live, that might be your only option. Still, people were like, when they see those kinds of things, oh, thank you, Elon Musk, because now I'm gonna have free internet. Regardless of what happened in the world, if you don't have a starting terminal, unlikely a whole account already set up, that's not gonna help you very much. And also setting up that account is not super obvious how to set it up because you have to say you're opening your account in a different country.
Okay.
And you need to have a credit card that looks like it's coming from that country in order to actually start that. So it's definitely not super simple to just get a satellite equipment from from from Starlink and just, you know, make it work.
I thought I thought what was interesting in this past year was in April. This is going back to my analysis of the geolocation file that Starlink publishes, you know, back when Russia invaded Ukraine Starlink provided service into Ukraine. We we had come across the the geolocation file that Starlink publishes and started downloading it every two hours and have done that for now, or approaching four years, I guess. And I wrote something up, an analysis of, you know, what we see on that.
But in April of last year, they added entries, of Venezuela, which is interesting because it's not a country that they officially operate in. And then, you know, we, you help me, identify, you know, like, go to a what, operating satellite a a Starlink terminal in Venezuela. What IP do you get? When you go to what is my IP, it's one of the IPs in the geolocation file.
So they are, you know, accurately geolocating the Venezuelan traffic, which, you know, I I don't totally understand.
I'm I'm glad people have access to service. It's a it's a very unusual arrangement and just another dimension of fascination to this whole Starlink subject.
You know, while I'm I might mention also, there's a there's a piece that came out, like, in the last day or so about, somebody who had looked at wrote something about BGP anomalies they saw in Venezuela. I just wanted to make a comment here. I think, this is kind of I I don't I don't think any of these anomalies are meaningful, I guess, to to be summarized by observation of just flipping through it. I also was looking at these kind of things. I I didn't notice the leaks. So is the incumbent. This is a s eighty forty eight.
And, yeah, there's there's leaks there. There there's there's actually quite a lot of, like, leaks, BGP misconfigurations. Oh.
Venezuela I get a ton of alerts on BGP.
Sure you do.
I mean, it's not I have those alerts set up, and I get a ton of them.
It's it's not a it's more of a it speaks more to the state of, you know, routing hygiene or just just the state of quality of network management in Venezuela. I I think you'd find something very similar in, sorry to say, Brazil or Bangladesh. They're just like, it's a lot of a lot of messy stuff there. I don't think, there's anything, you know, nefarious happening. I think this is I think it's another one we can chalk it up to just, you know, screwing stuff up.
But I guess the one thing with the the Cloudflare radar tool, which is really neat, you know, and the guys who operate this, I know them and they're great people. They're super smart. One one thing that I've learned from using BGP analysis doing is that we it's not enough to just find something in a message that a lot of this is, like, message by message is how I refer to message by message analysis. Looking for a AS path in a particular message, does it fit some sort of a leak pattern?
Okay. Now I found a leak. Well, the issue is that when routes are withdrawn, there's a scramble, there's conversions, and there's lots of momentary leaks that take place, and none of them have any operational impact. But if you were just not keeping track of the state, you would think there's all kinds of leaks and all these are not.
So, I think, this can be a little, I think, confusing to people who aren't don't don't live in this space, or or the idea of, like, a spike in BGP announcements. That really could be anything. It could be nothing. It could be something.
It's it's it's very weak evidence of anything.
But anyway.
So It's worth noting that there's been an increased effort in Venezuela to improve local traffic interconnectivity.
So a couple of IXPs, another one, those are private but close to the government as many things in telecoms has to be to survive in Venezuela. Another one that is more directly government controlled that has a lot less success. But yeah, and we will likely see a lot of improvement of that local traffic and we might see more or less depending on how well they manage those relationships.
Do you think there could be increased domestic connectivity?
They are trying to increase domestic connectivity.
Okay. So just in general?
In general, this is general.
They're supporting that significantly. And they're making investments on it. They have like there's one AXP that has like two nodes, one on one side of the country, one on the other.
And we have seen that routing inside improving also to reduce the costs of local operators. But also my opinion is to improve their resiliency of some services in case they need it or end up having difficulties connecting to the global internet, let's say, whether on purpose or by any other reason.
But yes, you all have to see like Iran, for example.
It was not super easy for them to end up in a position where they can cut internet access generally and continue to serve like internal services without Yeah.
That's a whole another significant that's a that's that's a that's topic. Yeah.
To get there. What what I assume is that they're working towards something like that, but it will take time.
Yeah. One one last, you know, detail that's probably worth covering before we wrap this up is, you know, I've covered connectivity in the to Cuba for a long time, and I think it's well understood. You know, if the Alba Alba cable, goes from Venezuela to Cuba, this is the primary means for the Cuban Internet to connect to the global Internet. One thing that I think I I don't know how this you know, there's there's gonna be downstream effects of whatever takes place in Venezuela to Cuba just for the, political dependency and economic dependency that the countries have on each other.
There's also an Internet dependency. I guess, one thing that I would clarify for for folks who aren't familiar with this is that, you know, that that submarine cable, it doesn't the service that comes across it does not, like, connect to Conte Bay or any of Venezuela provider. It just it it passes through. There's a like a it's like a wavelength just going right through the the country.
And and so an outage outages that take place for the ISPs in Venezuela typically don't have any impact, on on Cuba. Having said that, you know, anything's possible going forward if, you know, if the US government were to press on Cuban sorry. The US government were to press on the Venezuelan government to say, hey. Sever this connection or we're gonna, you know, send in the Delta Force again or something.
I don't know. Like, that's a thing that could they could cut that cable or cut they cut that service, but there's no reason to think that there's gonna be Internet outside of some kind of event like that. There's no sense.
It's not automatic that Internet perturbance in Venezuela go affects Cuba. I don't know. Did that checks with your understanding, Andres?
Yeah. One one hundred percent.
Some people are like, hey, but it's like Venezuelan Internet censorship. Does it affect the Cubans?
No, no. I mean, that happens in completely different places in the network. One is like inside of the ISPs. We're talking about physically different locations completely.
If run trace routes from Cuba to Venezuela or from Venezuela to Cuba, they go to Miami.
You're like, they don't even go you can't even you can't get a packet to just go from mainland Venezuela, go across cable into Cuba, and vice versa.
It's not possible. So there is some, you know, separation there, but who knows? Every day has surprises.
So yeah, I think like anything can happen. Like, there's still a lot of dust to settle in Caracas. And yeah, and we'll have to see like how how things end up. But so far, yeah, we expected a more significant shock to the internet in Venezuela more than we saw.
Significant changes in censorship. The outages mostly explained by power outages related to the actual attacks, kinetic nature of the attacks. And yeah, as I said, the vice president who is the acting president is Maduro's vice president. So we assume for the time being that the policy is going to be the same.
Actually, can mention that the minister of information and communications was in the security council that the acting president ran recently just after the recent events. And it was it was notable that minister was there. So so far, everything looks and that's the person who's responsible for internet censorship policy and internet policy in general. So it would look like not winds of change on that end.
It is interesting in this discussion that the little bit about people that we saw was related to power, power distribution and infrastructure. But the broader conversation around the censorship environment is still very relevant, clearly, and still very much part of the discussion.
I can say one more thing is that we did see a more significant drop in connectivity on some eastern states of Venezuela, the afternoon before the attacks, which we haven't been able to fully trace what happened there.
Yeah, that could be anything. It's consistent with a power outage in that region. But since all the attention and everything happened after Saturday, we haven't been able to fully track what really happened there. So I mean, it's anyone's guess if that was related or not. It doesn't directly look like it was related, or at least there's no evidence that it was.
But there's a more significant power outage. Like when we said about Caracas, connectivity drop was small. Well, this case, the connectivity drop was not as small, it was very significant on these other eastern states. Again, the afternoon before could have been just on our infrastructure sucking.
Yeah. It could have could have been something else. Also possible. We just don't know.
Right. Lot of unanswered questions for sure, some of which might be answered in the coming days and weeks or perhaps not. We'll see. But in any case, thank you so much, Andres, for joining today, for your insight into the situation into Venezuela, and for the work that you do, keeping an eye on Internet connectivity across the globe but especially in that region.
And Doug, of course, you, our resident director of internet analysis. Thank you so much for keeping an eye on the data, for your analysis, and the work that you do as well. And to our audience, thanks so much for listening today. Bye bye.