Italian firm helping Syria intercept e-mail

ROME - As Syria's crackdown on protests has claimed more than 3,000 lives since March, Italian technicians in telecom offices from Damascus to Aleppo have been busy equipping President Bashar al-Assad's regime with the power to intercept, scan, and catalog virtually every e-mail that flows through the country.

Employees of Area SpA, a surveillance company based outside Milan, are installing the system under the direction of Syrian intelligence agents, who have pushed the Italians to finish, saying they urgently need to track people, a person familiar with the project said. The Area employees have flown into Damascus in shifts this year as the violence has escalated, said the person, who has worked on the system for Area.

Area is using equipment from U.S. and European companies, according to blueprints and other documents obtained by Bloomberg News and the person familiar with the job. The project includes Sunnyvale, Calif.-based NetApp Inc. storage hardware and software for archiving e-mails; probes to scan Syria's communications network from Paris-based Qosmos SA; and gear from Germany's Utimaco Safeware AG that connects tapped telecom lines to Area's monitoring-center computers.

The suppliers did not directly furnish Syria with the gear, which Area exported from Italy, the person said.

The Italians bunk in a three-bedroom rental in Damascus when they work on the system, which is in a test phase, according to the person, who requested anonymity because Area employees sign nondisclosure agreements.

When the system is complete, Syrian security agents will be able to follow targets on flat-screen workstations that display communications and Web use in near-real time alongside graphics that map citizens' networks of electronic contacts, according to the documents and two people familiar with the plans.

Such a system is custom-made for repression, said Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which promotes tighter sanctions against Syria. "Any company selling monitoring surveillance technology to the Assad regime is complicit in human-rights crimes," he said.

Privately held Area, which got its start in 1996 furnishing phone taps to Italian law enforcement, code-named the system "Asfador." The title is a nod to a Mr. Asfador who cold-called the company in 2008 asking it to bid on the deal, said a person knowledgeable about the project. The person didn't know the man's full name, and efforts to identify him were unsuccessful. The price tag is more than 13 million euros ($17.9 million), two people familiar with the deal said.

Area chief executive officer Andrea Formenti said he couldn't discuss specific clients or contracts, and said the company follows all laws and export regulations.

He said governments often use what is known as "lawful interception" gear to catch criminals. Without referring specifically to Syria, Formenti said political change could outpace business deals.

"Any lawful interception system has a very long sales process, and things happen very quickly," he said.

When Bloomberg News contacted Qosmos, CEO Thibaut Bechetoille said he would pull out of the project. "It was not right to keep supporting this regime," he said. The company's board decided about four weeks ago to exit and is still figuring out how to unwind its involvement, he says.

As uprisings in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia toppled Arab leaders this year, Assad, 46, has held on, deploying security forces against demonstrators protesting his rule, and defying a call by President Obama to step down. Syria has been run by Assad and his late father, Hafez, for a combined 41 years.

Area is installing the system through a contract with state-owned Syrian Telecommunication Establishment, or STE, the two people familiar with the project said.

Without the Area gear, Syria's electronic surveillance captures only a portion of the nation's communications, and it lacks the new system's ability to monitor all Internet traffic, said the two people who know of Syria's capabilities through their work for Area.

Businesses that sell surveillance equipment to Syria should be held accountable for aiding repression, said Osama Edward Mousa, a Syrian blogger who was arrested in 2008 for criticizing the regime and fled to Sweden in 2010. "They are a partner to the killing of people in Syria," he said.

The United States has banned most exports to Syria other than food or medicine since 2004. That means the U.S. government may need to determine if the shipment of NetApp's hardware to Syria violated sanctions, said Hal Eren, a former lawyer for the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control.

NetApp makes its products in various countries, said its most recent annual report.

Jodi Baumann, its senior director for corporate communications, said in a statement: "NetApp takes these matters very seriously and is committed to global trade compliance. We are not aware of any NetApp products being sold or having been sold into Syria."

The NetApp deal was structured in a way that avoided dealing directly with Area, a person familiar with the project said. NetApp's Italian subsidiary sold the equipment through an authorized vendor in Italy that then resold it to Area, the person said.