LTTE Vs. Sri Lanka - A form of Cyberwarfare

As the battle between the SLA and the LTTE rages on, I decided to analyze another form of warfare between the two sides that has been raging for, well maybe not as long as the real war, but it has become very important in recent years. i.e. LTTE Vs. SLA Cyberwarfare. Although this is not as fierce (or real) as, say, the Cyberwar that erupted between Russia and Estonia (and more recently Georgia) and there is no real hacking of sites, banks or anything like that going on, the Internet has become a major source of information for Sri lankans and Tamils living in Sri lanka and abroad, and also a medium for propoganda for both sides, so holding the edge in this war can be justified as being important for both sides.

Google Search Volumes

To start off my analysis, I visit Google Insights for Search, where I can get an idea on the amount of web searches done using google for specific keywords throughout the world.

First, I search for the word 'LTTE'. I want to see the graph for the word 'LTTE', throught the world, from 2004 to present. Then I get the following graph.


The LTTE has had exposure to the world for quite some time. Now the same criteria for the phrase 'Sri lanka army' yields this.


Looking at the two graph, one can see the term LTTE gets searched more on google. This is confirmed by the bar next to the search term on the top right corner of the graph, which gives the average of all the points on the graph. 'LTTE' has an average of 50 while 'Sri lanka army' lags behind at 35.

Now comes the interesting graphs. The graph for the search term 'tamilnet' within sri lanka from 2004 onwards is this.


Tamilnet has been around for some time (longer than defence.lk) and this graph shows how many searches for it have originated from Sri lanka. The early years from 2004 to mid 2005 are the low points, at which time, the ceasefire was being repeatedly broken by the LTTE. Then, there is a sudden surge in searches during 2006, when Mahinda Rajapaksa has assumed power and the war was been openly fought out. Then it goes downwards (except for November 2007, when 16 are killed in a bomb attack in Colombo, and January 2008, when the government pulls out of the ceasefire agreement) and virtually dimishes at July 2008. This downward trend can be attributed to the government imposed ban on tamilnet within Sri lanka.

The graph for Sri lanka Ministry of Defence website defence.lk, for searches originating from Sri lanka from 2004 onwards is as follows.

The graph starts at around June 2006, which I think is around the time defence.lk was started (I'm not sure on this), and has continued its upward trend ever since. These last two graphs show how late the GoSL has been on entering the cyberwar. The LTTE has been spreading their word since 1997 while the government only started their website around 2006. This headstart has cost the GoSL something, since tamilnet has firmly established themselves as a major source of information on the internet for news regarding the ethnic conflict. The two graphs below, which show search volumes from 2004 onwards for tamilnet and defence.lk worldwide, confirm this.


Web Traffic Analysis

For web traffic analysis, I use two services, called Compete and Alexa.

Starting with Compete, the first thing to note is that this service calculates these graphs based on traffic from the USA only! But that fact aside, here is the graph for tamilnet and defence.lk websites.



The above graph shows the number of unique visitors for each site. As expected, tamilnet has a bigger audience than defence.lk, owing to their longer presence than defence.lk on the internet. But as the table below shows, the number of visitors for defence.lk has grown from June, while for tamilnet it has decreased (Although this trend might not hold in future).

Date: 07/2008	Visits	Month Δ	Year Δ
defence.lk	12,509	46.6%	265.0%
tamilnet.com	58,777	-10.2%	-11.0%

The popular Alexa site has the following graph for the comparison between tamilnet and defence.lk. Alexa collects its data from users who install their special toolbar for the web browsers, which sends the users surfing data to alexa servers, so this calculation is also biased.


This graph also shows tamilnet being over defence.lk, but that gap has diminished throughout the year and defence.lk for this month ranks higher than tamilnet.

Observations

The general trend among all statistics presented is that defence.lk is gaining on tamilnet rapidly. As I said earlier, the gap between the two sites' general popularity can be attributed to tamilnets headstart. But the GoSL has hit back by banning the website in Sri lanka, which caused its popularity to decrease and defence.lk to become a regular web destination for Srilankans.

But defence.lk has a lot to improve on. For example, tamilnet has made its website available in German and French languages for international readers (defence.lk is available in Sinhala), and their site is much more better in terms of organization of information and appearance. But the appearance and organization of defence.lk doesn't warrant a second visit. Tamilnet also has an edge over defence.lk on mobile phones, with a WAP version of its site available (I dont know wether this is still available or working).

You can argue on the statistics presented here, and I admit they are not rock solid. If you want to know more about the methods of calculation for the above represented data, the links are provided below.

• Alexa traffic rankings
• Compete FAQ
• Google Insights for Search Help

Post your comments (If you want to).

P.S. Perhaps our government can hijack tamilnets' IP address. Like many sites out there, they have only one IP address (83.138.147.99), and this kind of thing has been done before. If they do do this, then at least it will justify my including the word cyberwarfare for the heading of this post!