It won't be difficult; we all know who they are and where they are located," says the man, who underlines the group's international ties by speaking Spanish with the accent of a Spaniard while using Mexican slang."

LOL.. the guy its using a text to speech program.. !!!

After reading TFA.. i found:

"The evidence we have collected proves that there is a ban on secured authentications for communication tools, such as MSN, Yahoo Messenger, or the Facebook Chat. Syrian people who use these services should be aware that local authorities already stoled their passwords and that all their communications are being intercepted."

And as someone who has been implementing & supporting Proxy solutions for top 500 level companies in Latin America (yea, including Blue Coat & Squid).

I can tell that at least with Blue Coat the "MSN" Interception was possible with really old versions of MSN, Blue Coat Stopped selling and even supporting the IM interception product years ago, why ? because it was really difficult to keep up with the new versions of MSN..

So:

1.- The article is misleading
2.- All the Syrian country uses MSN v 1.0

You don't have a caching transparent proxy ? Then it's time to setup a linux with squid ...

UUCP over X.25 or over 300 bauds modems ? that were good times !!