It's one of those too-good-to-be-true stories about the promise of the Net for free speech and democracy in the Middle East, but this article from the LA Times, starting with a blogger who criticized the Syrian regime is worth a read-through:

Nour fought the crackdown. When his website was blocked, he copied his daily bulletin and e-mailed it to every reader registered on his site. He sat down at his computer to do the same thing the next day, only to discover that his e-mail address had been blocked.

Undaunted, Abdel Nour gave himself a fresh address, and the bulletin went whizzing off. Come the next day, that address, too, had been disabled. So he created another.

The cyber-jousting went on, day after day, for a month and a half. At last, the security services gave up. "Finally," Abdel Nour said, "they surrendered because they realized they can't control it."

Keystroke by keystroke, Syria's online voices are awakening from the slumber imposed by the late President Hafez Assad, who severely restricted both the Internet and satellite dishes. Things began to loosen when his son Bashar took over in 2000. He joined the Syrian Computer Society, encouraged citizens to explore the Internet and trumpeted technology as a hallmark of the new era he promised to usher in.

Emergent Democracy | International
Jan Frel's blog | email this page | delicious | digg | technorati