BICOM

US President Barack Obama yesterday ordered new sanctions to be imposed on Syria and Iran. The US president specifically pointed to the ‘digital guns for hire’ that help these regimes oppress their people with surveillance software and monitoring technology. The new sanctions imposed on Syria and Iran are in response to repeated human rights abuses and atrocities perpetrated against opposition members.

The measures will not only hit the two governments but also companies that help create systems that track or monitor activists for killing, torture or other abuses.  The sanctions will freeze property and interests of people under US jurisdiction who have participated in aiding the Syrian and Iranian governments and prevent individuals involved from entering the US.

“I’ve signed an executive order that authorises new sanctions against the Syrian government and Iran and those that abet them for using technologies to monitor and track and target citizens for violence,” Obama said in a speech at the US Holocaust Museum. “These technologies should be in place to empower citizens, not to repress them … It’s one more step that we can take toward the day that we know will come, the end of the Assad regime that has brutalized the Syrian people, and allow the Syrian people to chart their own destiny.”

In other news this morning, a virus was detected inside the control systems of Kharg Island which handles the vast majority of Iran’s crude oil exports, a source at the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) told the semi-official Mehr news agency. The virus, which is likely to draw comparisons with the Stuxnet computer worm that reportedly affected Iranian nuclear facilities in 2009-10, struck late on Sunday. It hit the Internet and communications systems of Iran’s Oil Ministry and of its national oil company. Computer systems controlling a number of Iran’s other oil facilities have been disconnected from the internet as a precaution, the agency added. Hamdullah Mohammadnejad, the head of civil defence at the oil ministry, was reported as saying Iranian authorities had set up a crisis unit and was attempting to neutralise the attacks.