Governments all over the world like to keep tabs on their citizens, especially when they feel threatened, and especially when they have an authoritarian streak. Syria is no exception. However a very out-of-balance situation may easily develop, where government knows what people are up to but the people dare not even talk about the government’s actions for fear of reprisals. This seems to have been the situation in Syria for some time now.

It was with a view to balancing that equation, with a desire to allow Syrians to communicate without fear of being overheard, that some people on the Telecomix IRC channel decided to mount OpSyria, an attempt to teach Syrians the basics of secure communications. Getting the attention of the people, in a very controlled national internet environment seems to have been the major challenge. Once that was achieved, a systematic program of education on how to make communications more secure was started…

Read more about this in an article on reflets.info:

#OpSyria: When the Internet does not let citizens down

We were a bunch of people from American, European and Middle-East countries regrouped on the Telecomix IRC and naively full of good intentions. We knew absolutely nothing regarding the censorship in Syria. We only had the certainty that their outgoing communications were severely limited and that this was the cause of our lack of information. Apart from that, we were totally blind and thus wanted to reach people for two reasons:

• Promote the use of security tools such as Tor, using HTTPS, avoiding spreading personal information on Internet, etc.
• Try to help in letting data such as videos or personal testimonies get out of the country while preserving leakers’ anonymity…

Full article here: #OpSyria: When the Internet does not let citizens down