Jamming Tripoli: Inside Moammar Gadhafi's Secret Surveillance Network | Threat Level | Wired.com

The Internet enabled surveillance on a scale that would have been unimaginable with the old tools of phone taps and informants.

Photo: Michael Christopher Brown

He once was known as al-Jamil—the Handsome One—for his chiseled features and dark curls. But four decades as dictator had considerably dimmed the looks of Moammar Gadhafi. At 68, he now wore a face lined with deep folds, and his lips hung slack, crested with a sparse mustache. When he stepped from the shadows of his presidential palace to greet Ghaida al-Tawati, whom he had summoned that evening by sending one of his hulking female bodyguards to fetch her, it was the first time she had seen him without his trademark sunglasses; his eyes were hooded and rheumy. The dictator was dressed in a white Puma tracksuit and slippers. How tired and thin he looked in person, Tawati thought.

It was February 10, 2011, and Libya was in an uproar. Two months earlier, in neighboring Tunisia, a street vendor named Mohammed Bouazizi had set himself on fire after a policewoman beat him and confiscated his wares. It was the beginning of the Arab Spring, a series of uprisings, revolutions, and civil wars that would radically alter the politics of the Middle East. In Libya, opponents of the Gadhafi regime had called for a day of protest on February 17, to mark the anniversary of a 2006 protest in the city of Benghazi, where security forces had killed 11 demonstrators and wounded dozens more.

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