After the Damascus Spring

Syrians search for freedom online.

Guy Taylor from the February 2007 issue

(Page 3 of 6)

The OpenNet Initiative, which monitors government filtration and surveillance of the Internet, says Web filters in Syria are “pervasive.” According to the group’s profile of the country, “Syria’s filtering takes place at the ISP level. Syria targets the websites of Syrian-specific and Arabic news sites that are critical of the government, Kurdish organizations, and foreign-based Syrian opposition parties. Access to the country code top level domain of Israel, ‘.il,’ is also blocked. There is variation in the level of filtering amongst the ISPs.”

 

Salem, the telecommunications and technology minister, acknowledged that the Syrian authorities have developed their own software for monitoring the Web. There’s also evidence that security officials hang around the cyber-cafés, blending in and looking busy while watching people. During one of my many café visits last summer, a Syrian I was working with discreetly motioned toward a well-dressed, mustached man sitting in a corner, smoking and tapping away on a laptop. “I see him here a lot,” my friend said. “I think he’s government.” The man and I suddenly made eye contact. I looked away, nervously touching my own mustache, and decided it might not be the best idea to approach him and ask him his business.

 

Beyond rumors that the president is a computer nut (one prominent Syrian intellectual working in the United States told me he “reads computer magazines as his bedtime literature”), the best evidence for his desire to expand Internet use in Syria was the addition of Amr Salem—a senior program manager at Microsoft’s U.S. headquarters in Redmond, Washington, from 1998 until 2005—to his cabinet in February 2006. After a cup of strong coffee in his vast air-conditioned office across the street from the Syrian Parliament, Salem, whose wife and children still live in the United States, told me he was in Damascus to use the technology revolution as a vehicle for the reforms Assad publicly promised six years ago.

 

“Human development is a key goal for this government,” he said, adding that “access to information is a key factor in accelerating human development.” I agreed and, settling into the cushions on his office couch, probed him about the issue of censorship, mentioning news releases from groups like Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists condemning the jailing of Syrian cyberjournalists.

 

“Basically,” Salem told me, “Syria is currently under attack, we have to admit that, by several powers, and if somebody writes, or publishes or whatever, something that supports the attack, they will be tried.” I asked what he makes of the journalist rights organizations that list Assad among the world’s leading suppressors of free speech. “It’s a stereotype,” he said, claiming that Assad does no more than U.S. President George W. Bush when it comes to battling journalists and activists. Such judgments, he said, are made “without taking in the whole context and understanding the dynamics at play and who these people are.”

 

Salem’s words rang in my head a few days later when I met Ammar Qurabi, head of the National Organization for Human Rights in Syria, who surprised me by saying that “some of the opposition members in Syria publicly portray the arrests of these journalist-activists as actually arrests of just journalists because they know it will make the regime look worse.” Thankfully, he doesn’t defend the detention of nonviolent activists, but he recognizes that if watchdogs describe the arrestees as “journalists,” the government’s image falls even lower.

 

Qurabi also gave me a lengthy list of people jailed by the government for things they put on the Internet, some de­­tained for years simply for writing their thoughts in emails. “In Syria, we do not have any laws regulating the Internet or websites,” Qurabi said. He didn’t mean that people are free to use the Net as they please. He meant that the limits are constantly shifting with the rulers’ subjective whims, so ordinary people are never sure where those limits are.

 

Mafia-Style Dictator or Likable Modern Guy?