قدرات الانترنت علي هزيمه النظمه المستبده و ارسال مستخديها للسجن- الايكومنست

هذا المقال القيم ظهر في مجله الايكومنست عدد 10 يوليو 2004
The internet can undermine harsh regimes—and land its users in jail






ABDEL RAHMAN SHAGURI'S computer is an ordinary one, but when he clicked the “send” button on its e-mail programme back in February 2003 it sent him straight to jail. The 32-year-old from Damascus looks set to stay there after being sentenced to two-and-a-half years in jail for “spreading false information”—that is to say, passing friends copies of an online newspaper that Syria's government doesn't like.






Four other Syrians have also spent the past year in jail for internet offences, such as showing photographs of anti-government demonstrations that officially never took place. The severity may seem odd, since Syria's president, Bashar Assad, led the country's main internet club before he got his current job.

Syria is not the only Arab state with a hyperactive cyberpolice. Tunisians jokingly call the worldwide web the inter-nyet, and with good reason. As in Syria, all the country's service-providers are run by either the government or the president's relatives. Owners of internet cafés must keep careful records of their customers. Many websites, including such dangerous outlets as Yahoo! and Hotmail, are banned.

Zouhair Yahyoui knows just how dangerous. Before being released last November, he spent 18 months in prison for the sin of running the country's most popular dissident website, Tunezine. In April, a Tunisian court sentenced six young men to between 19 and 26 years in prison for downloading what prosecutors said was “terrorist” material.

Unlike Tunisia (or Saudi Arabia, which has blocked some 400,000 websites), Egypt does not censor the net. Its plan to get more people to use it by allowing cheap internet access is justly hailed as a model. But its special cyberpolice taskforce is vigilant, especially in trapping homosexual men by posing online as potential mates. Lured to some public meeting place, the lovelorn gays find themselves clapped in irons and charged with “debauchery”.

Even so, the internet is having a profound impact on closed Arab societies as a forum for minority and dissident views. Though long shut in by UN economic sanctions, and by the stifling censorship of its press, at least a fifth of Libya's 5m people now use the internet; either by incompetence or choice, the country's rulers have failed to block the dozens of sites that mock, question and insult them. Although the Saudi authorities' firewalls are massive, al-Qaeda's operatives in the kingdom still manage to use the internet as their main mode of communication and propaganda. And, though Syria's police are mean to political dissidents, they are nice to software pirates. For just a dollar, you can buy a programme off the streets of Damascus to cover your internet tracks—and safely get a look at all the forbidden stuff.