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In this photo taken on a government-organized tour for the media, a Syrian boy passes next to Syrian government army soldiers, at one of several suburbs of Damascus. Muzaffar Salman/AP/Press Association Images
Repression
Irish company denies involvement in Syrian repression
AdaptiveMobile told TheJournal.ie that it did not renew a contract with a Syrian mobile phone operator last year because of the political climate.
AN IRISH COMPANY linked with text message-filtering technology used by the Syrian government has denied any involvement in Bashar Assad’s deadly crackdown on anti-regime protests.
In a statement to TheJournal.ie today, AdaptiveMobile said that it never had a relationship, provided services or engaged with the Syrian government or associated organisations.
The company provided private mobile phone operator MTN Syria with a text message spam and multimedia message anti-virus package in 2008.
Distancing itself from the controversy, the company advised that no upgrades or new releases have been provided to the product since 2008 and the support agreement expired in 2011.
Given the changing political situation in the region, AdaptiveMobile took the independent decision not to renew this contract.”
The statement was issued in light of a report by Bloomberg today which linked its software to the message filtering used by the Syrian government to stop the spread of dissent and to halt protest movements.
AdaptiveMobile said in the unattributed comments that it “does not condone the unlawful use or abuse of any software and/or technology and condemns any abuse of telecommunications networks to abridge human rights”.
It added that it has a clear strategy not to sell software to government bodies or intelligence ministries directly or through third parties.
Whilst AdaptiveMobile systems will process every SMS in order to block spam it is not designed to monitor individual communications or users and the Company has no evidence of it being used to do so, or being used in court proceedings.
A second Dublin-based company Cellusys was also linked to the blocking of certain text messages in Ben Elgin and Vernon Silver’s report.
The company has failed to return TheJournal.ie‘s calls but Bloomberg reported that its CEO Dawood Ghalaieny said that it cannot control how the system is used once it is in a country.
Sales of the software by Cellusys and AdaptiveMobile were completely legal. Stricter sanctions on interacting with the government in Syria and its agencies are now in place across the US and EU.
It is understood that Assad’s administration was able to block the opposition’s text messages by filtering out certain words, including “revolution” and “demonstration”.
Social media and mobile phone technologies were vital in the rise of the Arab Spring movements across the Middle East and North Africa throughout 2011.
Since protests began in March 2011, at least 5,400 people have died in Syria. At least 25,000 citizens have fled the country, while another 70,000 have been displaced within Syria.
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