Arab bloggers byte back :: Gulf News
(Los Angeles Times-Washington Post)

It wasn’t long before the tart-tongued economist awoke to find the site, all4syria.org, smothered by a white screen and a warning: “Forbidden”.
. . .
When his website was blocked, he copied his daily bulletin and e-mailed it to every reader registered on his site.

He sat down at his computer to do the same thing the next day, only to discover that his e-mail address had been blocked.

Undaunted, Abdul Nour gave himself a fresh address, and the bulletin went whizzing off. Come the next day, that address, too, had been disabled. So he created another.

The cyber-jousting went on, day after day, for a month and a half. At last, the security services gave up. “Finally,” Abdul Nour said, “they surrendered because they realised they can’t control it.”

Those tart-tongued economists. What are we going to do with them?

(Via Secret Dubai posting at UAE community blog.)

Here's more in an interview reprinted by The Daily Star. An extract:

Q. Why was All4Syria - a Web site you created in 2004 that compiles articles mostly written by regime critics - banned when several oppositional web sites are permitted in Syria?

A. For a simple reason: let us assume now that we have a PC and we surf the Internet. We go to those opposition sites and what do we see? The Assad family is very corrupt and we have to change them or kill them. The Alawites are running Syria and we should finish them off. We need freedom of speech and to free political prisoners. The corruption in Syria must end. The Baath is very bad - we should abolish it. You go to my Web site and you see: this is the official, this is his name, he did this, made this decision, which is wrong because of this, and because of his wrong decision he will impact this sector in this way. The president sent this delegation, and they are under-qualified and should be changed and replaced by the following people, and I list them. The Baath Congress lacks reformists, I wrote following elections in June; the government should appoint 150 reformists into the party to make up for their absence, I recommended.

If the average person reads the opposition Web sites, they think "we will not endanger our lives with these Utopianists." But the regular citizen reads my news ... There is no concrete or useable information against the officials in the opposition web sites. All4Syria is actually much more scandalous because those in the government who employ these idiots will see how badly qualified they are and figure out with whom they should be replaced.