Committee to Protect Journalists - Don't get your sources in Syria killed

[tabatha]

Because foreign journalists have been virtually banned from Syria during the uprising against Bashar al-Assad's regime, news coverage has relied heavily on citizen journalists and international reporters working with sources inside the country. Syrians who communicate with foreign news media run the risk of being threatened, detained, tortured, or even killed.

This month, a Syrian court sentenced citizen journalist Mohammed Abdel Mawla al-Hariri to death for the crime of "high treason and contacts with foreign parties." He was arrested in April immediately after giving an interview with Al-Jazeera about conditions in his hometown of Daraa, in the southern part of the country. According to a report by the Skeyes Center for Media and Cultural Freedom, al-Hariri was tortured after his arrest. In the wake of the verdict and sentencing, he was transferred to Saidnaya military prison north of Damascus.

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The al-Assad regime's surveillance of telecommunications--cell phones, text messages, email, and Internet traffic--is remarkably extensive. Using equipment built in the West by companies such as BlueCoat, the Syrian government censors the Internet, blocks websites, and snoops on traffic using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI). As if that was not enough, the Syrian government has sought to expand its surveillance capabilities. Late last year, Bloomberg News reported that the Italian company Area SpA was seeking to pull out of a contract to build an Internet surveillance system in Syria that would give the government the power to "intercept, scan, and catalog virtually every email that flows through the country." The report went on to say that all work on the system had been suspended, but the scope of the project gives a glimpse into the regime's Orwellian vision.

http://cpj.org/security/2012/05/dont-get-your-sources-in-syria-killed.php