Censors without borders

A week ago I blogged about a very disturbing trend: more and more American IT companies are beginning to justify their reluctance to deal with users from countries like Syria, Iran, or Zimbabwe by invoking sanctions imposed by the US government. In a sense, this makes life even harder for users who are unfortunate enough to live in countries where internet is already censored by their own governments.

As some of you may recall, I spent a few weeks back in March trying to untangle this – and I wasn’t really successful; there are simply too many rules that some of these companies like to quote out of context to justify the fact that they stop offering services to users in these countries (this makes good business – but bad corporate – sense: the risks of getting fined for dealing with designated individuals from the sanctioned countries outweigh the monetary benefits gained by hosting a bunch of Syrians or Iranians, who are not a very appealing bunch for most Western advertisers anyway).

There is an intriguing op-ed on Guardian’s site with how such behavior hurts internet users in Syria.  I’m quoting it almost in full, for it makes a very compelling case for the absurdity of such sanctions. Somebody in the State Department should really start taking action on this; otherwise, parts of the US government will end up supporting digital activists while other parts would make their life very hard…

Over the past few years, the Bush administration has imposed a series of sanctions on Syria. Most exports were prohibited after a key part of the Syria Accountability Act came into force in 2004. It meant Syrians were not allowed to download software from the US, but that should not have had an affect on logging on to American websites.

Travel to Syria and try to have a look at your PayPal account, and you will be confronted by a message from the company telling you: "You have accessed your account from a sanctioned country. Per international sanctions regulations, you are not authorised to access the PayPal system."

Things get a lot worse if you want to order something from Amazon when you are in Syria. It even bans UK citizens, using British credit cards, from using their non-US site Amazon.co.uk.

This is their explanation: "Syria is an embargoed country under US law. The law covers some products sold even by non-US subsidiaries of US companies [like Amazon.co.uk]. Because it is not practical for us to determine which products are capable of export to Syria from those that are not, we have blocked all exports of products to Syria."

US-based Syrian political activist George Ajjan was stung when he set up a website called Syriapol – A Syrian Democracy Project. The problem was that no one inside the country could access his site. The censor this time wasn’t the Syrian government, but the American web host GoDaddy.com.

"Due to the fact that Syria is currently classified as a state sponsor of terrorism by the US government, we are unable to provide services to individuals located in this nation," said Christine Jones, the head of the GoDaddy’s legal team.

Confusion, too, with Facebook. Even if you bypass the Syrian censors, some users are worried their accounts could be deleted without warning just for logging on. That is certainly what the site’s statement of rights and responsibilities seems to threaten. But the company says Syrians would only fall foul of the rules if they were using Facebook for commercial reasons, and admits it needs to be a bit more clear.

Some companies have seen sense though. Last week, social networking company LinkedIn deleted the accounts of its Syrian users, blaming the sanctions. Syrian bloggers got together on Twitter to vent their anger. One of the company’s press officers quickly saw what was going on and realised it was turning into a PR nightmare. Kay Luo blamed human error, saying someone at LinkedIn must have been a bit overzealous in enforcing the sanctions. Hours later, Syrians were back online.

Censorship, it seems, works both ways.