In Syria...

[Lyzandra Daria]

No freedom of the press or Free speech. No surprise
>>>
U.S. Firm Acknowledges Syria Uses Its Gear to Block Web

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... lenews_wsj

A U.S. company that makes Internet-blocking gear acknowledges that Syria has been using at least 13 of its devices to censor Web activity there—an admission that comes as the Syrian government cracks down on its citizens and silences their online activities.

Blue Coat Systems Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., says it shipped the Internet "filtering" devices to Dubai late last year, believing they were destined for a department of the Iraqi government. However, the devices—which can block websites or record when people visit them—made their way to Syria, a country subject to strict U.S. trade embargoes.

Blue Coat told The Wall Street Journal the appliances were transmitting automatic status messages back to the company as the devices censored the Syrian Web. Blue Coat says it doesn't monitor where such "heartbeat" messages originate from. Computer code reviewed by the Journal indicates that Syrians were also using other Blue Coat products, raising questions about how the tools came to be used this way and whether Blue Coat has violated the trade embargo.

As Arab Spring political uprisings have swept the region this year, Bashar al-Assad, whose family has ruled Syria for more than four decades, has overseen some of the bloodiest crackdowns on protesters. On Friday, Syrian troops opened fire on protesters, leading to fresh reports of deaths. According to the U.N., more than 3,000 civilians have been killed in Syria since the start of protests.

Blue Coat executives say they don't know how the devices got to Syria. The company says it alerted U.S. authorities in recent days to the "improper transfer" and is cooperating with government inquiries.

"We don't want our products to be used by the government of Syria or any other country embargoed by the United States," Steve Daheb, Blue Coat senior vice president, said, in the company's first detailed explanation of the matter. He said the company is "saddened by the human suffering and loss of human life" in Syria.

The discovery of the devices in Syria shows the difficulty of controlling U.S. tech exports and demonstrates how regimes manage to use Western technology to censor speech and stifle dissent even when they are subject to trade sanctions. As the Arab Spring uprisings swept the region this year, security forces used Western technology in their often brutal fight to retain political control.

Egypt's secret services used technology from a British company to eavesdrop on dissidents over Skype. Col. Moammar Gadhafi's regime snooped on the emails and Internet chats of Libyan dissidents using invasive technology from a French firm. And across the Gulf, Internet-service providers have been relying on tools from Blue Coat, Intel Corp.'s McAfee and the Canadian firm Netsweeper Inc. to snuff out opposition websites.

Since 2004, the U.S. has prohibited the export, without a special license, of most U.S. goods and services to Syria. According to the Commerce Department, applications for licenses to do business with Syria since then have been "subject to a general policy of denial."

Many companies don't track where their technology goes after an initial, legal sale. Though the U.S. government requires re-export licenses for controlled devices, the rules can be difficult to enforce.

A State Department official said, "We are reviewing the information that we have and monitoring the facts as they come in" and "are looking into" the Blue Coat matter. The authority to investigate potential embargo violations involving technology in Syria falls to the Department of Commerce. A spokesman there said the department doesn't comment on "ongoing investigations."

The devices' road to Syria is still partly unclear. The company says it shipped 14 of its ProxySG 9000 Internet-filtering appliances from Rotterdam to Dubai in late 2010, an order valued at an estimated $700,000. It believes 13 are being used to censor parts of the Syrian Internet. What happened to the 14th is unclear.

Blue Coat says it received a two-part order from a Dubai distributor in 2010 that identified the end customer as Iraq's Ministry of Communications. Blue Coat approved the order and delivered the devices to the distributor in the U.A.E. The company says it didn't follow up on where the devices went from there.

The Iraqi Ministry of Communications couldn't be reached to comment Thursday. Blue Coat declined to name the Dubai distributor.

"At the present time, the company cannot confirm how the appliances were transferred from the point of shipment or from Iraq to Syria," Blue Coat's Mr. Daheb said. The company is "continuing its own internal review."

Some of Syria's largest Internet-service providers have been using Blue Coat devices since as early as 2005, according to a person familiar with the matter. The order of 14 devices was the largest in recent memory, but as many as 25 appliances have made their way into Syria since the mid-2000s, with most sold through Dubai-based middlemen, this person said. Blue Coat says it is investigating other possible unauthorized transfers.

Blue Coat began life in 1996 as CacheFlow Inc., which sold appliances to businesses that quicken Web-page delivery, among other things. In 2002, it changed its name to Blue Coat and reinvented itself as a security company. The idea: Sell appliances that filter the Internet to protect big corporate networks. Today, that is Blue Coat's primary business.

The company has no corporate policy against selling to governments or Internet service providers engaged in censorship. Its devices block websites in the U.A.E., Bahrain and Qatar, a Journal investigation earlier this year determined.

Mr. Daheb says that "it is the government's role to set appropriate social policy and identify governments and entities that U.S. companies should not do business with."

Blue Coat's export-auditing system is focused on screening potential buyers before devices are sold, rather than on keeping track of devices once they are deployed, according to people familiar with the company.

Information about Blue Coat in Syria began to trickle out in August, after a "hacktivist" group called Telecomix managed to gain access to unsecured servers on Syria's Internet systems and found evidence of Blue Coat filtering. The group found computer records, or logs, detailing what Web pages the Blue Coat devices were censoring in Syria.

Earlier this month the group released those logs, but with all the Internet Protocol, or IP, addresses redacted for privacy reasons. IP addresses are unique numbers assigned to devices that connect to the Internet, often identifying location.

The Journal, however, has reviewed unredacted portions of the logs. The logs show the Blue Coat devices were filtering the Internet activity of individuals who were accessing the Web via Syrian IP addresses. The logs also include the serial numbers of the Blue Coat devices.

The logs offer a rare insight into what the Assad regime doesn't want Syrians to see online. Blocked sites include that of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, an opposition group banned in the country since it led an uprising against Mr. Assad's father in the 1980s, and the-syrian.com, a website dedicated to news about the uprising.

The devices blocked about 6% of the more than 750 million requests they filtered from July 22 to Aug. 6, according to a Journal analysis of the data. They blocked or monitored at least 26,700 attempts to connect to websites run by opposition figures or devoted to covering the Syrian uprising, such as all4syria.info and welati.net.

Visits to sensitive areas of social-networking sites were also recorded, but not necessarily blocked. Of more than 2,500 attempts to connect to facebook.com/syrian.revolution, for example, about 1,575 were blocked and 934 others were kept in the logs, according to the Journal's analysis.

Mr. Daheb said the devices censoring the Syrian Web don't have access to Blue Coat's main filtering database, which regularly categorizes new websites to be blocked by its software, such as pornography, gambling or religious sites. Blue Coat says it can't turn off the devices remotely.

The appliances do have Blue Coat service and support contracts. The company says it has now cut off contracts for the devices.

Also in the logs were indications that another Blue Coat product, PacketShaper, is being used in Syria. Blue Coat says it doesn't market or sell PacketShaper devices or software—which help companies keep computer networks running smoothly—in Syria due to the embargo.

The Blue Coat logs show that some people within Syria are also using a Blue Coat filtering product for personal computers, known as K9 Web Protection, which periodically interacts with the company's database of filtered websites. The K9 software works like this: When a person uses a computer with K9 to visit a certain website, the tool contacts Blue Coat to get information about the nature of the site and decides whether to block it.

It is possible, trade-law experts say, that such services could violate the U.S. embargo on Syria. "The executive orders this summer appear to be comprehensive," said Ronald Oleynik, head of the trade regulatory practice at the law firm Holland & Knight LLP.

Other software and service companies regularly prevent access from IP addresses in countries such as Syria. Google Inc., for example, does so for some of its software.

Blue Coat says its K9 software "may be eligible for export to Syria under exemptions that govern publicly available free software and informational materials incident to communications services." A person familiar with the matter said the company isn't sure and is awaiting word from U.S. authorities. In the meantime, Blue Coat's Mr. Daheb says the company has now revoked the licenses of K9 software to prevent access from Syria, "in an abundance of caution."

>>>
And that goes for virtually any non-secular Muslim country, it seems.

[Lyzandra Daria]

Syrian Forces Take Aim at Journalists

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2011/10/28/ ... ournalists

The Internet has been a critical part of the demonstrations in Syria, as it has in other “Arab Spring” uprisings, but forces in the country have taken aim at journalists and activists attempting to cover the protests.

Reporters Without Borders, a non-profit promoting press freedom, released a list Thursday of journalists, bloggers and cyber-activists detained in Syria who were attempting to cover the protests. The organization listed 22 people but said the roster “is almost certainly incomplete.”

“Reporters Without Borders urges the Syrian government to end its abuses against civil society members, especially all those who are providing the public with information about what is taking place,” the organization said in a statement.

Syrian rights organizations estimate that around 30,000 people have been detained since protests erupted in the country in March. According to the U.N., roughly 3,000 Syrians have been killed in the uprisings. The activist group Local Coordination Committees of Syria said at least 40 people were killed on Friday alone.

The Internet was key to organizing early demonstrations, and later, to helping document the uprising amid a severe government crackdown on communications.

As protests swelled in June, the government cut off about two-thirds of all Syrian networks from the global Internet for about a day, with some government-related websites remaining unaffected. Internet and mobile data connections periodically have been cut off since then.

Syrian activists have described passing camera and cell-phone data cards across borders to activists in Jordan and Lebanon to get videos uploaded online. Syrians who have been detained and released say their interrogators often asked for their passwords for Facebook and Gmail accounts, and lists of sites they frequented online.

In February, Syria’s government lifted a 2007 ban on social-media sites, which activists and experts say came only after the regime got access to surveillance software to keep watch on the sites. Still, many Syrians say they’ve shut down their Facebook or e-mail accounts amid the protests, for fear of surveillance. Many have turned to using software that enables anonymity online.

The Syrian Ministry of Information, the Syrian Embassy in the U.S. and the Syrian Mission to the U.N. did not respond to requests for comment.
>>>
It's is nice to know that information is still being 'passed'. Clever people will find ways to circumvent gov't restrictions.

I'm surprised that the company that created the software can't disable it. It would seem to me that would be a logical precaution to take. Especially when dealing w/ non-secular Muslim regimes.

I can understand a specific company wanting to block websites that employees can visit...such as pornographic sites. I would find it illogical for a company to leave itself exposed to possible espionage.

I can even understand a government wanting to be able to selectively 'spy' on who is visiting such websites (with proper legal warrants) including pornographic or extremist-type. I'm even pretty certain that the US gov't (CIA/FBI/NSA/Homeland Security) does have a way to 'screen' certain sites for specific language/words. More so now, since 9/11.

But, I would be very surprised if a secular democracy would literally block social networking sites. It just boggles my mind.

Maybe that group "Anonymous' should target Syria's internet. They were pretty good at shutting down a porn website recently and getting the IP addresses of individuals who posted porn to the website (IIRC).

Anonymous hackers take down child pornography ring

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Anonym ... story.html

"...The group previously had targeted the government websites of Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and others in efforts to support protest and rebel movements in those countries."

Maybe, it isn't possible. It seems like it might be possible. It would be very interesting if they (Anonymous) did something...possibly a virus(?), IMO.
>>>

[Lyzandra Daria]

across the border in Lebanon...
>>>
The Syrian web room

http://www.nowlebanon.com/NewsArticleDe ... ID=0&PID=0

The Qussair Revolutionary Council web operations room consists of one laptop, one television set with a satellite connection, two mattresses, and a teapot next to several cups scattered on the floor.

The three men in the operations room escaped the Syrian army’s bullets to cross the border into Lebanon in order to ensure there is media coverage of the Syrian uprising. They are all in their late 30s, and they don't know each other's names. They agreed to use nicknames, "Friday names," for their safety. "We know that the regime's agents are among the protesters, so we decided to keep ourselves safe, and we use fake names," the man who asked to be called Mohammad and who is in charge of the operations room told NOW Lebanon.

From the room Mohammad keeps in contact with his citizen correspondents through chat programs. They send him centralized footage, documents and the names of victims killed by the shabiha militia, the Syrian intelligence services or the Syrian army. Once he has verified the information, the three men post them on a website and send them to human rights groups and media outlets around the Middle East.

"Here is a statement we sent to Al Jazeera," Mohammad explains while his chat program beeps continuously, notifying him that he has new messages from a correspondent in Qussair, just over the border.

"We keep in touch like this, all the time. And we carefully verify the information,” Mohammad adds. “If, for example, we find out about a gas station being blown up by the regime's people in order to blame it on protesters, our man in the neighborhood contacts me and we decide if it's worth going there and filming it. We don't send out information unless we checked that it's completely true and we have proof or videos. If our man is not back in an hour or so, we know they killed him.”

"We are always in contact with the Revolutionary Council from Homs. There is a revolutionary council in every town where there have been protests,” Mohammad says as the two other men, Ahmad and Youssef, nod in approval while puffing their cigarettes. "The council comes up with the strategy to organize the protests, and they coordinate with us, the web people. In Qussair we have a person in every neighborhood. We only know their nicknames and we are constantly in touch through the internet and a safe phone line.”

"Qussair is completely besieged right now. They surrounded it with 40,000 troops around 10 days ago. They brought a brigade,” says Ahmad. "I just came from Syria this morning. They shot at me on the border. Nobody can get in, nobody can get out. They shoot at anything they see moving. I took the fields and went behind the mountains to be able to cross.”

Qussair is the biggest protester stronghold along to the Lebanese border, but it is not as strong as Homs, the three men say. "The regime really wants Homs to fall, because people there just don't give up, and they are not intimidated. If the army or the shabiha are guarding the streets during the day, they protest during the night. They go out and sing against the regime," Mohammad says. "There are strong people in Homs, they have tactics. They put a toy laser and a box on a stray cat and let the animal out on the street. The army thinks it's a bomb so they run away and take shelter. This gives the people time to organize and protest.”

According to the activists, Homs is the regime's target for the moment. "Qussair is very important. They managed to break Tal Kalakh because the town was surrounded by Alawite villages. But Qussair is not, and it strengthens Homs. They are trying to bring the town down in order to weaken Homs," Mohammad explains as he opens another message on his chat program.

Ahmad makes a phone call to verify the reports from international news agencies that the Syrian army is planting mines along the northern Lebanese border. "Yes, it's true. They are planting them in the fields in a village next to Qussair, Neim, toward the border so nobody can cross the border anymore," he says.

"Can they film it?" Mohammad asks.

"No, the soldiers are too many," Ahmad answers.

Mohammad plays the latest videos Ahmad brought from Qussair in the morning. One shows the massacre of 14 young men who had fled the town and taken shelter in a house in a nearby village, another shows a two-year-old boy who was shot in the head, and another shows a protester shot in the knee and brought to Lebanon for medical care.

The massacre video shows the shelled house where the 14 people had been killed, the blood on the floor, the protesters dragging the bodies of the young men from Assi River and the funeral. "This is gruesome," Mohammad says. "Ask him, he was a witness," he says, pointing at Youssef, who nods.

“I managed to run away when they started shelling us. We had fled Qussair when they brought the army. We were 27 men hiding in the house. But the shabiha and the intelligence followed our supply boy. We went back after they left and we filmed everything," he says.

"There are already seven people dead today. We already centralized the names. There is always coordination between us on the internet. We use certain chat programs that refused to give the Syrian regime access to survey the conversations. We have a human network at the local level, and there is also a network of towns, and the cities have their own network," Youssef explains.

"We don't run anything on the website and don't send anything to the media without having the proper information and double checking. We depend highly on these videos, so we have to make sure they are real. Our legitimacy is very important," Mohammad concludes.
>>>
There you go. The truth will be revealed and there are people willing to die to insure that the atrocities of the dictatorial regime of Assad are made public.

I do hope Assad was paying attention to how Qaddafi met his end. Did any of Saddam Hussein's male offspring survive? I'd say 40 years of the Syrian regime has been enough.
>>>

[Lyzandra Daria]

Surprise!!! Watch out...the Dept of Commerce is on the job. (*sarcasm*)
>>>
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nat ... tml?wprss=

The Commerce Department is investigating whether technology produced by a California company helped Syrian police monitor dissidents amid a bloody crackdown there, U.S. officials said Thursday.

Commerce officials are attempting to determine whether Blue Coat Systems of Sunnyvale, Calif., had prior knowledge that its equipment and software was being used by the Syrian government, according to several U.S. officials. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation.

Calls and e-mails to Blue Coat officials seeking comment on Thursday were not returned.

The company has previously said it did not sell equipment or software to the Syrian government, but it has acknowledged that its products are being used there and could have been obtained through a third party. U.S. sanctions prohibit sales of most goods to the nation; investigators are attempting to determine who provided the Blue Coat technology to Syria.

A statement from the company this month said: “Blue Coat is mindful of the violence in Syria and is saddened by the human suffering and loss of human life that may be the result of actions by a repressive regime. We don’t want our products to be used by the government of Syria or any other country embargoed by the United States.”

The Blue Coat technology is not intended for surveillance purposes, according to the company, but it has functions that could help authorities monitor electronic communications while also blocking people from accessing certain Web sites and some forms of social media.

On Thursday, three senators urged the Obama administration to investigate whether Blue Coat and another California-based company had provided “tools of repression” to Damascus.

“The sale of U.S.-made equipment that may have contributed to ongoing violence is unacceptable and should be investigated as soon as possible,” said the letter from Sens. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) and Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.).

The Commerce Department has primary responsibility for controlling surveillance exports. Eugene Cottilli, spokesman for the Commerce Bureau of Industry and Security, declined to comment.

“We do not discuss any matters related to ongoing investigations,” Cottilli said.

Should the Commerce Department find that Blue Coat knowingly violated licensing rules, it could fine the company up to $1 million, according to Daniel Minutillo, a lawyer based in Silicon Valley who specializes in export law and technology. Smaller civil penalties and other actions also are possible.

Blue Coat last month hired law firm McDermott Will & Emery to lobby for the company after news reports about the use of its technology in Syria, according to disclosure forms.

Syrian President Bashar al­-Assad has been battling an uprising that began during the Arab Spring and has grown increasingly violent in recent months. The United Nations estimates that 3,500 people have been killed since protests began. This week, the Arab League suspended Syria for failing to honor a peace deal that included a pledge to halt attacks on protesters.

Recent news reports have revealed that authoritarian governments have used U.S. and other Western technology to monitor dissidents and other citizens. In some cases, middlemen have facilitated the transfer of this technology.

U.S. companies that wish to export devices that are “primarily useful for the surreptitious interception of wire, oral or electronic communications” must apply to the Commerce Department for a license, according to the export administration regulations.

Sales by U.S. companies to Syria are illegal under sanctions imposed by President George W. Bush in 2004. When selling items to countries under U.S. sanctions, a license is required to override the restrictions.

At a congressional hearing Nov. 9, Assistant Secretary of State Jeffrey Feltman said the Blue Coat technology being used in Syria had not been granted any export licenses.

The senators who asked the Obama administration to investigate Blue Coat also asked for an investigation into the California-based company NetApp.

Bloomberg News has reported that NetApp equipment is part of a Syrian Internet surveillance project designed to intercept and catalogue all e-mail in Syria.

“We absolutely do not support the sale of NetApp equipment to Syria,” chief executive Tom Georgens said in a statement Thursday. “We have no interest in providing product to a banned country, and I just wanted to make sure that was clear.”

>>>
What is clear is that somebody was greedy, IMO, and saw an opportunity to line their own pockets with the blood money. Christians aren't above being greedy or even envisioning that they are furthering the 'Jesus cause'. There seems to be no morality or ethics in big business and banking anymore.

I suggest that somebody in that company KNEW that the equipment/software being purchased by the 3rd party would wind up in a country that the US has sanctions against. Money, money, money. Blue coat made big bucks and the 3rd party probably charged a 'handling fee'.
>>

[Lyzandra Daria]

Syrian websites hosted in Canada, US

http://www.boston.com/news/world/canada ... canada_us/

More than two dozen websites belonging to the government of Syria are being hosted by servers in the United States, Canada and Germany, according to a report by Canadian researchers.

The report released Thursday said the operations raise legal questions because they may violate Canadian and U.S. sanctions against Syria, which has used police and military forces for the past eight months to put down a popular uprising.

Ronald Deibert, the director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, said several Syrian websites -- including the ministries of finance, economy and trade, and religious affairs -- are hosted on U.S.-based servers.

Overall, the report said, 17 Syrian government websites are hosted by Canadian providers, seven are hosted by U.S. providers and two by German companies.

"We had a moral obligation to report this given the violence in Syria," Deibert said in a telephone interview.

One of the U.S-based companies, called SoftLayer, is listed as hosting the ministries of finance and economy and trade as well as the General Commission for Competition and Antimonoply. SoftLayer did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

iWeb, a Montreal-based hosting company, is listed as hosting several Syrian government sites. iWeb said in a statement that it's a complex issue for the web hosting industry and said they support any initiative that helps bring clarity to the issue.

The report noted that in Canada and the U.S., a Web host typically has not been held liable for such content if the company responds to requests that it be taken down.

Canada's foreign affairs department said it has asked the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to investigate the allegations.

"We have asked the RCMP to investigate this report to ensure our sanctions are respected," spokeswoman Aliya Mawani said late Thursday.

Deibert said it was unclear whether Web hosting violates U.S. and Canadian sanctions.

"There's definitely a question. Cyberspace governance is immature and underdeveloped," Deibert said. "Sanctions are designed around a world much less fluid and material than cyberspace is. I think if you are going to put named entities on a sanctions list that government needs to provide some guidance to the private sector about what that means."

Deibert also cautioned that any removal of a website from a Web hosting service should also be treated as a potential infringement on freedom of speech and access to information.

The report also said Syrian state television station Addounia TV, which has been sanctioned by Canada and the European Union for inciting violence against Syrian citizens, uses Canadian-based Web servers to host its website.

"Addounia TV to me is probably the most serious because it is a television station that has been sanctioned for inciting violence," Deibert said.

Deibert noted that Romeo Dallaire, the Canadian general who headed the U.N. peacekeeping force during the 1994 Rwandan genocide, regretted not pulling the plug on a radio station that incited genocide in Rwanda.

The United Nations estimates more than 3,500 people have been killed in Syria since last March, when President Bashar Assad began clamping down on Syrians who spoke out against his regime.

The report also says a website for the official media arm of Lebanese political party Hezbollah, is hosted on Canadian and U.S. based servers and uses Canadian servers to stream its TV broadcast globally. Canada classifies Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.
>>>
How do you like that? Terrorists get to broadcast their crap in our countries...but I'll bet they would scream like irrational Muslims (hard to tell the difference) if we tried to broadcast any programs in opposition to their hate speech in their country(ies). No doubt, if anyone posted such comments they would be banned and the terrorists would have the IP address to track them down and murder them.

IMO, Freedom of speech only moves one way for Muslims...up the black hole of Mohammad's a$$ crack.
>>>

[Lyzandra Daria]

Guess where my HP laptop originated from...China
>>>

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-1 ... oject.html

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) equipment worth more than $500,000 has been installed in computer rooms in Syria, underpinning a surveillance system being built to monitor e-mails and Internet use, according to documents from the deal and a person familiar with the installation.

The gear made by Palo Alto, California-based Hewlett- Packard would run a Damascus monitoring center for Syrian agents to track citizens’ communications, and route data, according to blueprints and the person familiar with the system. The Italian company running the project, Area SpA, bought the equipment through resellers in Italy, according to the documents and the person familiar with the deal.

More than 3,500 people have died in Syria’s crackdown on protesters since March. At the same time, technicians from Area were installing and testing the surveillance system, which also includes data-storage equipment from Sunnyvale, California-based NetApp Inc. (NTAP), a Nov. 4 article by Bloomberg News showed.

Area, which is based outside Milan, bought the Hewlett- Packard and NetApp gear as part of a contract with Syria’s state-owned fixed-line telephone company, according to the documents and the person familiar with the transactions.

The gear from Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest computer maker, cost 427,911 euros ($578,000), according to Area financial records. Almost all the Hewlett-Packard equipment consists of racks of servers housed in fan-cooled cabinets, according to schematics and the person familiar with the job who has worked on the project for Area. Desktop computers comprise an additional portion.

Compliance Highest Priority

Hewlett-Packard spokeswoman Shelby Watts declined to comment specifically on Area’s surveillance system.
“HP’s policy is to comply with all U.S. export control laws and regulations,” the company said in a statement. “We do not have any employees or facilities in Syria, and our sales to parties in that country have been limited to items that are consistent with U.S. law and licensing policy on telecommunications products.”

“Compliance with U.S. and international trade laws are of the highest priority for HP,” the statement said.
The U.S. has banned most American exports to Syria other than food or medicine since 2004, and issues licenses that permit exceptions.

Hewlett-Packard spokeswoman Watts declined to address whether this particular sale had been covered by a license or comment on anything else beyond the company’s statement.

Eugene Cottilli, a spokesman for the U.S. Commerce Department, said, “We are prohibited by law from discussing specific information about export licenses.”

Project Backlash

When reviewing license applications for sales to Syria of telecommunications equipment and associated computers, the U.S. evaluates whether the export would promote the free flow of information among the Syrian people and to the outside world, he said.

U.S. Senators Mark Kirk, a Republican from Illinois, Robert Casey, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, and Christopher Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, have called for an investigation into NetApp’s role.

Amid a backlash against the project, Area Chief Executive Officer Andrea Formenti said Nov. 8 that his company is weighing options that may include exiting the deal. Area has never had any relations with Syrian intelligence agencies, and its dealings comply with all export rules, the company said.

Work on the Syria project has been suspended for more than two months, Formenti said, declining to say why. Technical problems “could be one of the reasons,” he said. The project hasn’t been completed and has never been operational, he said. Formenti didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story.

Area records show Western suppliers’ financial stake in the Syria deal.

Deep-Packet Probes

The bill for Hewlett-Packard equipment compares with 2.75 million euros for the NetApp data-storage systems, according to the records and the person familiar with the installation.

Germany’s Utimaco Safeware AG (USA) and Paris-based Qosmos SA also supplied technology for the project, according to the documents and the person familiar with the deal. European Union sanctions against Syria don’t bar such sales.
Qosmos, a maker of deep-packet inspection probes that peer into the contents of e-mails, said it had been working on the project through Utimaco and is pulling out of the deal.

Utimaco, based in Oberursel near Frankfurt, makes systems that connect tapped telecom lines to monitoring center computers. The company said in a statement on its website that it requires all its partners to adhere to German and EU export regulations and United Nations embargos.

“We are thoroughly investigating the matter and have stopped any further activities with Area until we receive full clarification from them,” Utimaco said.

‘No Intention’

Sophos Ltd., the Abingdon, England-based provider of security and data-protection software that controls Utimaco, said in a Nov. 11 statement, “We are working very closely with our team at Utimaco to understand this situation fully and see that a full investigation takes place.”

NetApp said in a statement that it condemns any unlawful shipments to Syria and has notified the U.S. government about the Bloomberg article.

“We absolutely do not support the sale of NetApp equipment to Syria,” NetApp CEO Thomas Georgens told investors on an earnings conference call Nov. 16. “I’m not here to suggest that we have found a legal way to achieve an objective to sell products to a banned country. We have no intention of doing that.”

“NetApp produces storage products; we don’t produce applications that are being talked about in this particular article,” Georgens said. “NetApp has not produced this application or participated in its development at all.”

Iran Sales

Hewlett-Packard has previously sold computers and software for use by Syrian telecommunications companies under licenses granted by the U.S. Commerce Department.

In a March 12, 2009, letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said that in the previous five years it had applied for and been granted 14 such licenses for sales that generated revenue of about $4 million.

That letter came in response to an SEC inquiry about Hewlett-Packard’s sales of printers to Iran through a Dubai- based distributor, which the Boston Globe had revealed in a December 2008 report. Hewlett-Packard said that while the sales through a non-U.S. subsidiary were legal, it had decided to end distribution in Iran.
>>>
Maybe US companies have learned some of the two-faced communication that Muslims love to use to describe their 'religion of peace'.

I question the ethics of US businesses dealing with countries that are known to be re-selling products to countries that can't buy the same products from US companies directly.

I'm so tired of this $hit.
>>>

[Lyzandra Daria]

Cyberwar explodes in Syria

http://www.cnn.com/2011/11/22/world/mea ... index.html

A familiar digital chime rang on the computer. Someone was calling via Skype from Syria.

It was a law student and opposition activist from the city of Homs who uses the pseudonym Musaab al Hussaini to protect himself from arrest. He had fresh reports that security forces were shooting guns wildly in the neighborhood Baba Amrr.

Hussaini was calling via Psiphon, an online encryption system he had just installed that morning. He said it protected him from detection by the Syrian security services, also known as mukhabarat.

"Yeah, I feel safe now, because I use software to get an encryption connection to the Internet," Hussaini said. He said Psiphon also allowed him to circumvent government firewalls which block access to popular communications sites like Skype.

"If you want to open Skype in Syria today, we cannot, because it’s blocked. And if it was opened, we would be afraid of everything ... of making a voice call. We are afraid to be recorded by the mukhabarat," he said.

Psiphon is a surveillance-busting networking system designed by a Canadian company with funding from the U.S. State Department. The company's CEO told CNN the software had been "aggressively" introduced to Syria just three weeks ago. Since then, thousands of people had begun using it.

"What we're doing is not much different to what the airwaves provided during the Cold War to provide those citizens living behind the Iron Curtain with an ability to get information which otherwise they were not getting from their state," said Rafal Rohozinski, CEO of two companies involved in developing Psiphon.

"Whereas shortwave radio during the Cold War was very unidirectional ... with the Internet these technologies are by definition bidirectional, meaning that it gives an opportunity for citizens within these states to also communicate amongst themselves and with the outside world."

For the past eight months, Syria has been locked in a bloody cycle of anti-regime protests and violent crackdown. The United Nations accuses government security forces of systematic torture, disappearances and the use of deadly force to crush dissent. More than 3,500 people have been killed since March. The UN's top human rights monitoring commission has repeatedly accused the Syrian regime of carrying out crimes against humanity.

But this bloody test of wills is not only being fought in the streets. Activists, diplomats and IT specialists say there is also a high-stakes war of information being waged in cyberspace.

Since media are strictly controlled by the Syrian government, and foreign journalists are by and large prohibited from entering the country, the Internet has played a vital role for Syrian opposition activists smuggling out images of atrocities carried out by security forces.

"Regimes like that of (Syrian President) Bashar al-Assad know very well how access to information but also free expression and press freedom are a risk to him if he wants to continue to control all the power," said Marietje Schaake, a Dutch member of the European Parliament who is an outspoken advocate for freedom of expression, particularly over the Internet.

"We've seen an enormous crackdown on people, but also through the information systems and communications tools that they are using, and that's quite frightening," Schaake said.

Some observers argue the Internet has become a battleground in an all-out Syrian cyberwar. One side in the conflict is even referred to as the Syrian electronic army.

On November 14, the European Union slapped sanctions against 18 Syrian individuals closely associated with the alleged abuses of the Damascus regime. Among those singled out to have their assets frozen were George Chaoui, Amar Ismael and Mujahed Ismail. The EU described each as a "member of (the) Syrian electronic army. Involved in the violent crackdown and call for violence against the civilian population against Syria."

"The Syrian electronic army is basically a group of hackers built around the Syrian computer club which at one time was under the patronage of Bashar al-Assad. Its IP addresses indicate that it is collocated in facilities which belong to the Syrian government," said Rohozinski of SecDev, who has worked closely with the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab program documenting the Syrian conflict in cyberspace.

"They have been responsible for a number of high-level hacking attacks against a variety of targets including Syrian opposition movements," he added.

The arsenal of IT weapons the Syrian government uses to control information apparently includes surveillance hardware and software developed by Western companies, as well as by American corporations that are barred by U.S. sanctions from selling such technology to Syria without first obtaining a license.

This month, the California-based Internet security companies NetAPP and Blue Coat announced they would cooperate with U.S. authorities, after a series of investigative reports by Citizen Lab and the Bloomberg news website revealed their web-monitoring products were being used by the Syrian government.

"We condemn the use of our storage by the Syrian government to repress it own people," NetApp wrote in a statement on its website.

Blue Coat also confirmed that some of its ProxySG appliances were operating from IP addresses in Syria, saying they were "apparently transferred illegally to Syria."

"We do not know who is using the appliances or exactly how they are being used," Blue Coat announced on its corporate website this month. "Blue Coat is mindful of the violence in Syria and is saddened by the human suffering and loss of human life that may be the results of actions by a repressive regime. We don't want our products to be used by the government of Syria or any other country embargoed by the United States."

Subsequently, Citizen Lab, which is affiliated with the University of Toronto, said it had identified Blue Coat devices on four other IP addresses "belonging to the Syrian Communications Establishment."

Meanwhile, the Italian company Area SpA, which works with law enforcement agencies to monitor telephone and Internet communications, and the German data encryption company Ultimaco have also issued statements announcing they were freezing their work in Syria.

In a series of articles, Bloomberg revealed Area had been contracted to install an electronic surveillance system in Damascus using products from NetAPP and Ultimaco.

In response, Area SpA's CEO, Andrea Formenti, was quoted in Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper this month announcing that his company had no employees in Syria and that the project had not made any progress in the last two months.

"The interception system has never been activated and cannot be under current circumstances. There has been no repression carried out thanks to our equipment," Formenti told Corriere della Sera.

"These technologies can be as effective as weapons," argued Schaake, the European Parliament member. She has called for a broad inquiry into the role that information and technology companies are playing in countries like Syria.

"We cannot turn a blind eye to the serious human rights violations that happen with Western-made technologies," Schaake said.

Schaake said activists have described being confronted during interrogations with Syrian security forces with detailed transcripts of their conversations, which are evidence of electronic eavesdropping.

And a Western diplomat stationed in Ankara, the Turkish capital, said on the eve of a planned Internet video conference between Syrian exiles in Turkey and dissidents in Syria, many of the Syrian participants were raided by security forces.

"The day before, the Syrian regime went in and killed ten of them and the whole thing fizzled out," said the diplomat, who has been in close contact with the Syrian opposition. "If we would have had Psiphon then, I think we could have avoided that."

The Syrian government clearly has far greater technological resources than the opposition. But the Syrian cyberwar is not a one-sided conflict.

Damascus accuses foreign governments, as well as international broadcasters like Al Jazeera, CNN and the BBC, of aiding and abetting "armed terrorist groups," the term the Syrian government often uses to describe the opposition movement.

Syrian security forces recently announced they seized large numbers of police radio scanners and satellite phones, according to a report published by Syria's state news agency, SANA.

Confiscated communication devices included "Thuraya satellite mobile phone sets which were used for satellite communication among the terrorists and those who work with them and between them and the misleading satellite TV channels," SANA wrote.

SANA accused foreign governments of smuggling communication devices across borders and of strengthening cell phone signals to allow opposition members to roam on foreign phone networks as far as 50 kilometers into Syrian territory.

Last summer, as thousands of Syrians fled across the border to Turkey to escape Syrian security forces, some Syrian opposition members used Turkish 3G data connections to share images of terrified families camping in the countryside and of Syrian security forces shooting at civilians.

SANA also published photos of seized satellite technology it claimed was used by the Israeli and U.S. military.

"The existence of these devices in Syria indicates the clear involvement of these countries ... to back the terrorists in Syria with advanced internet and communications systems," SANA wrote.

While a growing number of Western and Arab governments have denounced the Syrian regime's pattern of human rights abuses and held meetings with Syrian dissidents, so far none has admitted to supplying communication devices directly to the opposition.

However, the U.S. government has publicly declared it supports freedom of access to the Internet globally. Washington has also supported the development of encryption technologies for use in authoritarian countries, including Psiphon, which is now being used in Syria.

Psiphon creator Rohozinski said he and his company had been in direct contact with Syrian opposition activists to deliver the networking system.

Rohozinski said Psiphon establishes a private connection between a person's phone or computer "to a part of the Internet cloud that makes it very difficult for the authorities to know where that person is going through. Moreover, it usually both encrypts and obfuscates that connection."

Rohozinski said Psiphon is distributed through the discrete delivery of a link.

"It can be an SMS message, it can be an e-mail, it can be a link to a website that says 'go here to get a secure tool,'" Rohozinski said. "They go there, and either that tool opens when they click on the link, or they download a small application which will run natively on their device and provide that kind of service."

In Homs, activist Musaab al Husaini told CNN he had just shared Psiphon with two of his friends. Previously, he said, opposition groups had used several other similar systems to avoid authorities, the most well-known network probably being TOR.

Psiphon appeared faster and easier to use, Husaini said. Connectivity was essential, he added, because most of the activists were communicating across Syria and abroad via Facebook and Skype.

Despite the advantages offered by online social networking, demonstrators continued to risk life and limb protesting in the streets.

"My cousin has been arrested. There are more than five or six of my friends that have been killed," Hussaini said. But the risks were worth the sacrifice, he said.

"We are fighting for freedom, for democracy, for dignity," Hussaini concluded. He said goodbye, and the encrypted Skype call from Syria ended with a digital burble.

>>>
So…one US company provides the Gov’t of Syria with the means to block and track internet contacts of its citizens. Another company (Canadian) with backing from US financing, develops a way to circumvent the Gov’t.

Talk about playing both sides. People are dying. Granted, that isn’t our fault. We aren’t pulling the trigger.

Next, somebody is going to figure out how to crash the Syria gov't system, IMO. Or, better yet, to send 'false' instructions to military personnel...to overthrow Assad. He can't avoid his 'destiny' for long, IMO. Dictators don't end their lives well in most cases, especially (it seems) in Muslim countries.
>>>