Censorship and government monitoring aren’t the only problems facing Syrian Internet users. There have been frequent, recent shutdowns of all Internet traffic crossing the Syrian border over the last few months, accompanying dramatic changes in how the country connects to the rest of the world. With growing international diplomatic pressure and sanctions against Syria, the Syria Telecommunications Establishment (which controls the country’s Internet infrastructure) has increasingly taken its network business somewhere it’s wanted: China. But despite sanctions, some Syrian ISPs still maintain a presence in the US, with the largest hosting its homepage on a server in Chicago.
In April, the Obama administration announced sanctions against Syriatel, the Syrian telecommunications company, for its role in "tracking and targeting citizens for violence." Syriatel owns SAWA, Syria’s largest ISP. While that has prevented US telecommunications companies such as Cogent and Level 3 from doing business with SAWA, it hasn’t stopped the Syrian company from using some US Internet services.
While doing research for this story, Ars discovered the website for Computer Engineering Corporation, SAWA’s technology services company, was hosted on a server at HostForWeb’s Chicago data center. A company spokesperson for HostForWeb was not available for comment. While the site appeared to be down 15 minutes after we placed a call to the company, a ping of the site and a lookup of the IP address still resolved to a host at the company. At this article's publication, the site appeared to be functioning normally again.
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