IT is breaking out in Syria

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Mar 22, 2004
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Syrian hackers outsurf the Mukhabarat
By JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT

DAMASCUS, Syria

In the summer of 1995, Bashar Assad, the heir-apparent to the Syrian regime, loped into a meeting between Syrian Computer Society members and Ba'ath Party officials and ordered the society's computer engineers to do something they'd never done before: log onto the Web. When they'd done that, he told them to call up "Peace in the Golan," an Israeli Web site dedicated to unmasking the corruption of his father's regime.

"You should have seen us sweat," said Amr Salem, the co-founder of the society, recalling the incident in an interview in Damascus a few days ago.

"We [the computer engineers] had to translate the contents of this site to the [Ba'athist] officials. It was not comfortable." Still, he added, "it may not have been the right choice to start with, but it was a start." As the translation flowed, the fossilized apparatchiks squirmed in their stiff uniforms.

Until that unexpected encounter, the Syrian regime had ranked as one of the world's most centralized and insulated. The Mukhabarat, or secret police, controlled all information flowing in or out of the country. Every phone call, letter, telex or fax was monitored and many were censored. Even today, according to Western diplomats based in Damascus, some diplomatic messages sent by mail and even e-mail continue to arrive at their destination having been tampered with. Sometimes they don't arrive at all.

But the Internet era has punctured the regime's ability to exercise the full control of information it used to maintain. While access is still largely limited to Internet cafes, and the cost is prohibitive for many, content flows fairly freely once you're on-line.

Homegrown hackers have even managed to bypass Web sites that the regime has sought to block. You can log on to jpost.com at Internet cafes all over the capital, even in the Yarmuk Palestinian refugee camp. In all, it is now estimated that up to 500,000 Syrians (out of a population of 18 million) use the Internet on a regular basis.

Salem co-founded the still-fledgling SCS in 1989 despite the fierce opposition of the Mukhabarat. Computers were one thing, the Internet, whose specter tormented the Mukhabarat, was another.
Assad's first wobbly foray into the Internet in Syria sparked terror among his father's ruling clique.

"The government was more than shocked," Salem said. "They told us we are out of our minds. They still do."

The Mukhabarat warned that spies would riddle the state, picking it apart thanks to the information they gleaned on the Internet.

"We answered them that if this was the case, they should not post state-secrets on the net," Salem said.

With the backing of the putative leader, who would succeed his father five years after that fateful meeting, Syrian's slow introduction to the interactive world began. From 1995-1997 the SCS worked on designing Syria's Internet infrastructure, ultimately signing a protocol with state-controlled Syrian Telecommunications Establishment (STE) to deregulate itself to allow the Internet to edge in. By March 1998 the government had formally agreed to allow the establishment of the Internet in Syria despite the Mukhabarat's howls against it.

But it was not until Hafez Assad's death in June 2000 that the first dial-ups appeared outside of closely monitored government agencies. Slowly the onslaught of information crept up on a regime that gradually realized that its secret police had been right: stemming the flow of information proved impossible.

According to Ayssa Midani, a hi-tech consultant and co-director of Syrian Scientists, Technologists and Innovators Abroad (NOSSTIA), "Now the people's demand for information has outstripped the government's ability to provide it. They are so thirsty for knowledge."

Oddly, one of the few Web sites the Mukhabarat still blocks, sort of, is Ayman Abdel Nur's all4Syria.org, one of the country's most popular news sources. A blog catering to those who eschew the often mind-numbing state newspapers, Abdel Nur's site is a compendium of some of the Syrian writing and art censored in the state-run media.

The Ba'ath Regional Command has banned his Web site in its many manifestations. But Abdel Nur bypasses the bans and Internet blockades by frequently switching servers and changing his site to a viral e-mail list.

Some 15,000 recipients forward the Web content on to their friends, and Abdel Nur is not quite sure how many people it reaches.

Abdel Nur publishes his site from his modest home in downtown Damascus. His wife, eight months pregnant, joked that "he should get a real job."

But Abdel Nur remains hopeful; Assad has purged the regime's bureaucratic relics and he is certain that one day his Web site will again be "published openly."

Whether Syrians will get a chance to read it is another question. Last April, Deputy Minister of Communication and Technology Nibal Idlbi told a technology forum that Syria hoped to achieve a 20-percent Internet subscription rate by 2013. That's a tall order for a country with only 0.2% of its population on-line.

And while foreigners tap into Syrian blogs and banned Web sites, most locals are not even aware of their existence.

One self-professed "Syrian heretic," Ammar Abdulhamid, a man who said he is "courting death by media" by giving countless interviews to foreign reporters, openly skewers his government, Assad included.

In a meeting in his new Damascus offices last week, he delivered one of his favorite new lines referring to Syria's Mafia-style of government and it's purportedly clumsy leader: "The Syrian president is not Michael Corleone but his [hapless] brother Fredo."

Following the guffaws, he was asked how it is that he is not dead. (The new darling of foreign journalists, Abdulhamid had given over a dozen interviews in the week following Syria's announcement that it would withdraw from Lebanon.) He answered that, for starters, he has "wasta" or protection. His mother is a famous Syrian actress, he said. After a brief pause, he added: "And I've never been asked to do an interview with the Syrian media."

Bashar Assad has over-estimated his ability to control knowledge that can be gained on-line. Or Maybe he has pulled a fast one on the Leaders of the Ba'ath Party, and put himself in a position to glean some of the power that they will loose when people have access to on-line information.

I guess with only .2% of the country on-line they could pull the plug, but I really think that it is to late for that.

As a side bar, this certainly will compliment the Bush doctrine, as it pertains to Syria