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Syrian Activists Circumvent Regime Censorship

Despite the Syrian regime’s relentless crusade to ban activists from sending and receiving information in their country, dissidents have found a number of ways to stay connected. Here is a brief overview of three methods they use.

1) Proxy servers:

Dima, a young Syrian activist from Damascus, told Movements.org,“most of the websites that are important to us are banned. All of the local media outlets that oppose the regime cannot be accessed from Syria.”

For example, local websites, like SHRIL (Syrian Human Rights Information Link) that is run by famed Syrian activist Razan Zaitouneh, are blocked in Syria. SHRIL contains links to hundreds of websites that are currently banned, some of which were blocked years before the beginning of the revolution in Syria. 

All4Syria is a website run by Syrian intellectual Ayman Abdel Nour. The regime banned his website in 2004 because it discusses issues considered taboo.

Ayman Abdel Nour, who was a council official under Bashar Assad, told Movements.org, “In Syria, there are 1,200 subscribers with free access to the Internet, all of whom are high ranking officials. Out of 1,200 subscribers, we receive 800 visitors every day.  We also have a lot of subscribers who use proxy servers to visit the website, and we send 17,000 newsletters to email addresses daily.”

“We have our own way to browse these websites,” Dima told Movements.org. “For instance, we use programs like ‘Ultrasurf’ and ‘Tor’ in order to bypass the bans. Recently, we started using ‘tor’ more often because it’s more secure.”

2) Satellite connections

A few weeks before the revolution began, many Syrian expatriates provided activists on the ground with IP satellite phones, which they can use to browse the Internet without needing access to the Syrian network. These phones have allowed Syrian activists to post many of their videos online.

Amjad, a Syrian activist who lives in Homs, told Movements.org, “We still need a lot of technological support. The Internet is the only weapon that allows us to fight this regime that uses all kinds of real weapons to crack down on our uprising.”

3) Smuggling DVDs

When all else fails, activists have resorted to an older means of transmitting information. According to Amjad, many activists have smuggled DVDs containing images and footage from the Syrian crackdown into Turkey or Jordan in order to post them online. While this is nothe the most technologically advanced method, it shows just how far Syrian activists are willing to go to have their voices heard