Untangling Dictators' Webs

Antigovernment protesters in Syria have a hard time reaching the outside world, since the government selectively blocks cell-phone coverage in protest areas, and most use a slow dial-up Internet connection. Some of them rely on a contact overseas. The Syrian, who has seen the inside of prisons before and asked that his name not be printed, receives video files from activists in Daraa. The Syrian helps format the videos and posts them to YouTube. He's exactly the kind of person the State Dept. would like to help right now: a pro-reform dissident, enabling others to get their story out through the Internet. But the Syrian is skeptical.

As the Administration struggles to keep up with the pace of change in the Arab world, the State Dept. is set to announce $28 million in grants for tools and training to help activists like the Syrian and his compatriots interact and organize online. The grants are a way to combat "repression 2.0," as Michael Posner, the Assistant Secretary of State for the agency's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, puts it. Autocrats and their intelligence operatives are increasingly turning to social media and sophisticated technologies to track and infiltrate dissident groups. Before the fall of dictator Ben Ali, for instance, Tunisian authorities uploaded phony Facebook and Gmail login pages with the aim of stealing the passwords of activists. In the past, U.S. officials thought that if dissidents could simply get to Facebook, Twitter, and other unrestricted sites on the open Web, they could organize themselves. Posner now says that training activists to avoid traps and giving them the tools to stay safe in digital environments is "perhaps the most critical part" of countering online repression.