Nov 4 International

Syria Crackdown Aided by U.S.-Europe Spy Gear (an Italian company sells network censoring equipment to Syria)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-03/syria-crackdown-gets-italy-firm-s-aid-with-u-s-europe-spy-gear.html
http://backupurl.com/bst5w8
By Ben Elgin and Vernon Silver -
Thu Nov 03 23:01:00 GMT 2011

As Syria's crackdown on protests has claimed more than 3,000 lives since March, Italian technicians in telecom offices from Damascus to Aleppo have been busy equipping President Bashar al-Assad's regime with the power to intercept, scan and catalog virtually every e-mail that flows through the country.

Employees of Area SpA, a surveillance company based outside Milan, are installing the system under the direction of Syrian intelligence agents, who've pushed the Italians to finish, saying they urgently need to track people, a person familiar with the project says. The Area employees have flown into Damascus in shifts this year as the violence has escalated, says the person, who has worked on the system for Area.

Area is using equipment from American and European companies, according to blueprints and other documents obtained by Bloomberg News and the person familiar with the job. The project includes Sunnyvale, California-based NetApp Inc. (NTAP) storage hardware and software for archiving e-mails; probes to scan Syria's communications network from Paris-based Qosmos SA; and gear from Germany's Utimaco Safeware AG (USA) that connects tapped telecom lines to Area's monitoring-center computers.

(omitted)

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واشنطن تنصح السوريين بعدم تسليم أنفسهم لنظام الأسد
Washington advised the Syrians not to surrender themselves to the Assad regime
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/9799/0,,15511819,00.html
04.11.2011 (Read original Victoria Nuland's briefing)

The US State Department advised day Friday the Syrians not to surrender themselves to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad after Damascus announced amnesty for those who hand over their weapons. Victoria Nuland said a spokeswoman for the State Department told reporters, "I would not advise anyone to surrender to the authorities of the regime at the moment", expressing concern about the safety of doing so. The United States said yesterday she had not seen evidence that Syria take steps to implement the agreement with the Arab League. A spokesman for the U.S. State Department that "the Assad regime has a long history of broken promises and his hands stained with much blood."

The Syrian authorities have vowed to campaign for Amnesty arms who give themselves up in a period of eight days, according to the official Syrian television reported Friday. The Syrian television and told the official Syrian news (SANA) "calls on the Ministry of Interior of citizens who took up arms, or sold or have distributed, transmitted, purchase or financing of purchase had not committed murder to give themselves and their weapons to the nearest police station in their area and will be concluded to leave them immediately and during the the period from the fifth to the twelfth of November. "

State television said the government gave the arms bearers weeks starting on Saturday (November 5) to give themselves and their weapons under the amnesty as long as they "did not commit murder offense."