Surveillance Painting - Kon Trubkovich

Kon Trubkovich, Untitled, 2010, Oil on canvas, 50.5 x 50 inches

Russian-born artist Kon Trubkovich paints scenes of distorted, glitched videos with oils. His worked is concerned with notions of space and memory visualization and deals with the technological transfer of information, and the inherent visual aspects that occur from disruption, interference, and distortion. His paintings are abstruse digital stills characterized by lines, blips, anomalies; they may contain recognizable elements or be completely abstract, lack identity and be unclear in content.

From the Prosthethic Knowledge archive.

The Dark Side of the Digital - May 2-4 2013, Milwaukee, Usa

At least since the 1980s, the digital has been the occasion for enthusiastic, often utopian, dreams. In almost every area of human and nonhuman endeavor—finance, consumer culture, technoscience, education, medicine, communication, or the arts—digital technologies have been heralded as revolutionary if not redemptive. But there has always been a dark side to such digital enthusiasm—dark places that scholars of the digital tend to overlook as they illuminate new fields and paths; dark practices that intensify social inequalities and accelerate environmental destruction; and dark politics that often remain obscure to global media users. Devastating labor conditions at factories like FoxConn in China are exacerbated by the appetite for next generation iPhones or iPads. Securitization and data mining are fueled by the eagerness of contemporary media users to share their search patterns, location, and affective labor. And the environmental destruction from disposing the hazardous waste of still functioning but outmoded media devices, or mining for the precious metals that the continued production of these new devices require, is mostly invisible to the consumers of new tablets, mobile phones, HD monitors, and netbooks.

The Dark Side of the Digital seeks proposals for critical, historical, and theoretical papers and creative presentations that shed light on some of the dangerous but overlooked consequences of the 21st-century transformation from mechanical reproduction to digital remediation. We are especially interested in work that pays particular attention to the conjunction of neoliberalism and socially networked digital media, in order to offer some suggestions about how the digital can best move forward in the 21st century. In particular we seek papers and presentations that pursue instances of specific digital technologies in such realms as:

• surveillance and security
• cyberwar and drone warfare
• technoscience
• media, arts, or culture
• communication
• education
• economy and finance
• energy, resource, and waste management
• medicine and healthcare

Proposals should also address strategies for resisting some of the more perfidious elements of the digital, including those that emerge from and must remain in the interstices of the 21st century networked society of control. We invite contributions from practitioners of digital arts and sciences, media theorists and philosophers, historians, cultural critics, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and other analysts of digital technologies and culture.

Please send your abstract (up to 250 words) and a brief (1-page) CV by Friday, January 4 to Richard Grusin, Director, Center for 21st Century Studies, c21@uwm.edu. read more

Artist Profile: Adam Harvey by Joanne Mcneil @ Rhizome, 11th June, 2012

It's interesting that your career has gone from taking pictures to thwarting cameras, with projects like CV Dazzle and Camoflash. When did you become interested in camouflage and face-detection spoofing?

I became interested in spoofing and camouflage when cameras metamorphosed from art making tools into enablers of surveillance societies. This happened gradually over the last decade starting with the Patriot Act in 2001. To me, this document marked the beginning of the end of photography as I knew it from art history books. Now, 175 years after the daguerreotype was invented, cameras integrated with facial-recognition systems comprise the fastest growing sector of the biometrics industry.

But the use of photography in biometrics is almost as old as photography itself. In the late 1800s Sir Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin and pioneer of biometrics, used composite imaging in an attempt to predict criminal behavior and illness. For example, if a subject has similar facial features to that of a criminal he or she was more likely to commit a crime.

I see spoofing and camouflage as intelligent responses to the uses/misuses of photography: surveillance cameras, biometric systems, and paparazzi photography.  Though these uses have always been part of photography at large, it’s impossible to ignore their presence now.

Sometimes this negative omnipresence supersedes the camera’s role as an art-making tool. As a photographer, I think spoofing and camouflaging tactics can help offset this effect and make photography more interesting, more communicative, and that this can lead to better pictures. Camoflash and CV Dazzle are projects centered on making photography more interesting.

One of my favorite quotes, by René Magritte, is that “everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.” When everyone is photographing and revealing the world, it becomes interesting to try and cover it back up, to reveal anonymity.

Thinking of "How to Hide from Machines," included in the exhibition FaceTime at On Stellar Rays last winter, in which DIS magazine assisted with your tactical makeup and hairstyling ideas; there's something very stylish about CV Dazzle in addition to its function. What was your inspiration? Do you consider these looks "design fiction" or something we might one day see out on the street?

I think it depends on the cost associated with being exposed in public. If there is an increased threat to privacy or instances of abuse in the biometrics industry, then I think it is very likely that spoofing in public could become more acceptable.

The looks I collaborated on with DIS magazine could easily be classified under design fiction, but so could a lot of runway fashion. One of the goals of this project is to make camouflage communicative. The looks we designed were meant to make the wearer feel protected but not invisible.

It was interesting to see how the models reacted to wearing it. One of my favorite images from the shoot with DIS is when one of the models started texting and smoking while wearing CV Dazzle. This made it seem as if it had already become practical.

CV Dazzle plays on the difference between what the human eye sees rather than the vision of a camera/computer. Almost counterintuitive to our idea of "camouflage," it exaggerates appearance rather than conceals. Thinking now of that Magritte quote, would you say that exposing and exaggerating is the new way to hide?

Exaggerate and expose. That’s a good way to put it. Exaggeration makes artificial-life difficult for robots. They expect uniformity.

I recently came across an article about facial-recognition where a biometrics expert was quoted saying that smiling can be detrimental to biometrics. It’s rare that professionals in this field admit vulnerabilities like this. But it’s comforting to know that they exist and that sometimes the best way to exploit them is to be just be more human, to be weirder than machines expect.

I think exposing and exaggerating could be a good strategy for hiding in the future, especially when armed with knowledge of how biometric systems work and what kinds of costs are associated with them. That’s what I’m interested in pursuing more.

What was the inspiration for Off Pocket (the pants pocket that disconnects a mobile device from its signal)? 

Smartphones infiltrate our senses. They cause anxiety, phantom vibrations, and keep us on alert. We expend energy maintaining an always-on connection. Smartphones should come with a switch to turn this off, but they don’t. Turning my iPhone off and back on takes 45 seconds. Using flight mode is also clumsy. I wanted a way to quickly and politely disconnect myself without relying on the phone’s software or hardware features. The Off Pocket circumvents this design flaw.

A few years ago a friend of mine in Georgia built a sensory deprivation tank and let me try it. The inside of the tank was filed with salt water, soundproofed, and completely dark. At first it was unsettling. But then I adjusted. Within 5 minutes my body totally relaxed and I fell asleep. It was an eye opening experience to limit all of my senses.

Similarly, when I first modified my pants with signal attenuating fabric, it felt odd to be unplugged. It was as if I had blocked out part of the world, covered my ears, or closed my eyes. But then I adjusted and realized that I had just opened them again.

I think building privacy into modern garments can make them feel more comfortable and, like armor, more protected. Data and privacy are increasingly valuable personal assets and it doesn’t make sense to not protect them. It’s also a great conversation starter.

Age:

31

Location:

Brooklyn, NY

How long have you been working creatively with technology? How did you start?

The first time I tried to integrate emerging technologies with photography was with the Internet Portrait Project in 2003. This was a web-based work that solicited portraits from around the world and composited them into one smooth, anonymous, genderless face.

After that, I became interested in combining programming with photography, but Photoshop was difficult to script and there weren’t a lot of other choices. Now, Processing and OpenFrameworks make this easy.

Describe your experience with the tools you use. How did you start using them?

My first camera was a Pentax K1000. It’s probably the most classic film camera. This was my gateway into photography.  Now I mostly use my iPhone.

My first programming experience was with Flash 4. This was a bad way to learn programming. Now I use a lot of Processing, OpenFrameworks, PHP, and C.

Where did you go to school? What did you study?

I went to Penn State for undergrad to study mechanical engineering. In my sophomore year, I started working at my school’s newspaper, The Daily Collegian, as a photojournalist. I spent the next 4 years in digital media and photography.

In 2008, after 4 years working as a web designer and photographer, I went back to school for my masters at NYU in their Interactive Telecommunications Program. There I studied computational photography, physical computing, and wearable technology.

What traditional media do you use, if any? Do you think your work with traditional media relates to your work with technology?

Right now my entire workflow is digital. My experience with chemical photography makes me appreciate this a lot. I used to get nosebleeds in the darkroom.

Are you involved in other creative or social activities (i.e. music, writing, activism, community organizing)?

I’ve recently become active in the Tabula Rasa project in the E.U. and am a member of the LUCID NYC group. I occasionally attend and speak at conferences too.

What do you do for a living or what occupations have you held previously? Do you think this work relates to your art practice in a significant way?

Absolutely. I work as a creative technologist and use a lot of the same skills in professional work as I do in my artwork.

Who are your key artistic influences?

Writers.

Have you collaborated with anyone in the art community on a project? With whom, and on what?

I recently worked with an artist on a kinetic sculpture with a salvaged missile guidance system. Right now I’m working with another artist on a robotic sculpture. And in the next few months I’m working with a photographer on another CV Dazzle collaboration. Also, I regularly bug friends who work in fashion for their advice on new projects ideas.

Do you actively study art history?

Sure. Right now, I’m really into medieval armor and outdated shorthand writing systems.

Do you read art criticism, philosophy, or critical theory? If so, which authors inspire you?

For art criticism I follow ArtStars* because it’s totally sassy and non-commercial. Otherwise, I read an overdose of popular art blogs, tweets, and manically try to stay on top of current trends, new technologies, and what everyone is doing. There is so much interesting work going on right now.

Are there any issues around the production of, or the display/exhibition of new media art that you are concerned about?

Yes, I think the production of a lot of new media art suffers from a fragile interdependence of technologies and is too reliant on closed source, proprietary tools.  For example, works made for viewing on digital devices could easily be nullified by something as simple as a browser upgrade or a change to an API.

Platforms like Arduino and RaspberryPi make it possible and cheap enough to produce new media works that are more self-contained. And I think Frm.fm will could help streamline the display, exhibition, and maintenance of screen-based works. But soon a new and superior technology will emerge and we’ll all want that instead.

Read more on Rhizome website

James George - DepthEditorDebug (New York, 2011)

DepthEditorDebug 
February 2011 
Public candids combining DSLR and Kinect 
Collaboration with Alexander Porter 


 In a future of user-complicity in surveillance can we create a parallel narrative allowing those who are seen to abstract and enjoy their own image? We intend for these images to represent a hint of the potential for play and experimentation in a world of advanced imaging technology. 

Process 
The images depict fragments of candid photographs placed into 3-dimensional space. They use depth data captured from a Microsoft XBOX Kinect video game controller with hacked drivers, digital SLR images, and custom software. 

Background 
In October of 2010, science fiction writer Bruce Sterling gave the keynote speech concluding the Vimeo Festival + Awards in New York. He described his prediction of the future of imaging technology. Regarding how a camera of the future may function, Sterling said: "It simply absorbs every photon that touches it from any angle. And then in order to take a picture I simply tell the system to calculate what that picture would have looked like from that angle at that moment. I just send it as a computational problem out in to the cloud wirelessly." One month later, Microsoft released their new video game controller, the XBOX Kinect. Kinect is unique in that it uses a depth sensing camera and computer vision software to sense the position and actions of gamers. A group of developers released an Open Source device driver that allowed programmers to access the Kinect's data on a personal computer. Visualizations of space as seen through Kinect's sensors can be computed from any angle using 3D software. When the drivers were made available, online creative software developer communities were flooded with artistic and novel interpretations of this data. The images were often characterized by depictions of people as clouds of dots and wireframes representing human figures moving in time. In mid-2005, six weeks after the tragic subway and bus bombings in London, New York's Metro Transit Authority (MTA) signed a contract with the high-tech defense and military technology giant Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin promised the MTA a high-tech surveillance system driven by computer vision and artificial intelligence systems. The security system turned out to be vaporware and the contract collapsed under lawsuits. As a result, thousands of security cameras in the New York subway stations sit unused. (WNYC source story) It is in this technological atmosphere that we chose to collaborate. We soldered together an inverter and motorcycle batteries to run the laptop and Kinect sensor on the go. We attached a Canon 5D DSLR to the sensor and plugged it in to a laptop. The entire kit went into a backpack. We spent an evening in the New York Union Square subway capturing high resolution stills and and archiving depth data of pedestrians. We wrote an openFrameworks application to combine the data, allowing us to place fragments of the two dimensional images into three dimensional space, navigate through the resulting environment and render the output. These prints are selected renderings from this process.

Read more on James George website

Shaul Schwarz - Drugwar :: Narco Culture @ CCCB, Barcelona, 2012

Read & See more on Schwarz' Narcoculture: Anti-narcos police raid in a striptease club, Tijuana, Mexico, 2011. + Schwarz' website

Surveillance and Identity Discourse, Subjectivity and the State - David Barnard-Wills (Ashgate, Uk, January 2012)

• 
  
  Surveillance and Identity analyses the discourse of surveillance in the contemporary United 
  Kingdom, drawing upon public language from central government, governmental agencies, 
  activist movements, and from finance and banking. Examining the logics of these discourses 
  and revealing the manner in which they construct problems of governance in the light of the 
  insecurity of identity, this book shows how identity is fundamentally linked to surveillance, 
  as governmental discourses privilege surveillance as a response to social problems.
  
  In drawing links between new technologies and national surveillance projects or concerns 
  surrounding phenomena such as identity fraud, Surveillance and Identity presents a new 
  understanding of identity - the model of 'surveillance identity' - demonstrating that this is 
  often applied to individuals by powerful organisations at the same time as the concept is 
  being actively contested in public language.
  
  The first comprehensive study of the discursive politics of surveillance in the UK, this book 
  makes significant contributions to surveillance theory, governmentality theory, and to 
  political and social identity theories. As such, it will be of interest to social scientists of all 
  kinds working on questions of public discourse and political communication, identity, 
  surveillance and the relationship between the individual and the state. 
• Contents: Preface; Introduction; Surveillance, governmentality, identity and discourse; 
  Discourse theory and analysis; Representation of surveillance practices; Subjectivity and 
  subject positions in discourses of surveillance; Identity in discourses of surveillance; 
  Conclusions and implications; Bibliography; Index.
• About the Author: David Barnard-Wills is Research Fellow in the Department of Informatics 
  and Sensors at Cranfield University, UK
• Reviews: 'These carefully selected fascinating case studies allow Barnard-Wills to chart the 
  connections between emergent forms of identity, new technologies and governmental 
  projects. The result is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the contemporary 
  politics of surveillance.' Kevin D. Haggerty, University of Alberta, Canada 
  Read more

Protocol How Control Exists after Decentralization - Alexander R. Galloway - MIT Press, Usa, 2004

Is the Internet a vast arena of unrestricted communication and freely exchanged information or a regulated, highly structured virtual bureaucracy? In Protocol, Alexander Galloway argues that the founding principle of the Net is control, not freedom, and that the controlling power lies in the technical protocols that make network connections (and disconnections) possible. He does this by treating the computer as a textual medium that is based on a technological language, code. Code, he argues, can be subject to the same kind of cultural and literary analysis as any natural language; computer languages have their own syntax, grammar, communities, and cultures. Instead of relying on established theoretical approaches, Galloway finds a new way to write about digital media, drawing on his backgrounds in computer programming and critical theory. "Discipline-hopping is a necessity when it comes to complicated socio-technical topics like protocol," he writes in the preface.

Galloway begins by examining the types of protocols that exist, including TCP/IP, DNS, and HTML. He then looks at examples of resistance and subversion—hackers, viruses, cyberfeminism, Internet art—which he views as emblematic of the larger transformations now taking place within digital culture. Written for a nontechnical audience, Protocol serves as a necessary counterpoint to the wildly utopian visions of the Net that were so widespread in earlier days.


Alexander R. Galloway is Assistant Professor of Media Ecology at New York University.

Taken from "The Physical Media" Chapter:
While many have debated the origins of the Internet, it’s clear that in many ways it was built to withstand nuclear attack. The Net was designed as a so- lution to the vulnerability of the military’s centralized system of command and control during the late 1950s and beyond. For, the argument goes, if there are no central command centers, then there can be no central targets and overall damage is reduced.
If one can consider nuclear attack as the most highly energetic, dominat- ing, and centralized force that one knows—an archetype of the modern era— then the Net is at once the solution to and inversion of this massive material threat, for it is precisely noncentralized, nondominating, and nonhostile.
The term protocol is most known today in its military context, as a method of correct behavior under a given chain of command. On the Internet, the meaning of protocol is slightly different. In fact, the reason why the Inter- net would withstand nuclear attack is precisely because its internal protocols are the enemy of bureaucracy, of rigid hierarchy, and of centralization. As I show in this chapter, the material substrate of network protocols is highly flexible, distributed, and resistive of hierarchy.

The packet-switching technologies behind the Internet provided a very different “solution” to nuclear attack than did common military protocol during the Cold War. For example, in 1958 the Royal Canadian Air Force and the U.S. Air Force entered into agreement under the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). NORAD is a radar surveillance system ringing North America that provides early warnings of missile or other air attacks against Canada and the United States. “The command monitors any potential aerospace threat to the two nations, provides warning and assessment of that threat for the two governments, and responds defensively to any aircraft or cruise missile threatening North American airspace.” The NORAD system is a centralized, hierarchical network. It contains regional control sectors, all of which are ultimately controlled by the USSPACECOM Command Center at Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs, Colorado. It functions like a wall, not like a meshwork. 

Faced with a nuclear attack, NORAD meets force with force. Once the outer protection zone of the land- mass is compromised, the NORAD command is able to scramble defensive air power through a rigidly defined system of command and control that is directed outward from a single source (USSPACECOM), to subservient end- point installations that help resist attack. The specific location of each radar installation is crucial, as is the path of the chain of command. During the Cold War, NORAD was the lynchpin of nuclear defense in North America. It is a “solution” to the nuclear threat. 

The Internet system could not be more different. It follows a contrary organizational design. The Internet is based not on directionality nor on toughness, but on flexibility and adaptability. Normal military protocol serves to hierarchize, to prioritize, while the newer network protocols of the Internet serve to distribute.
In this chapter I describe exactly what distribution means, and how pro- tocol works in this new terrain of the distributed network. I attempt to show that protocol is not by nature horizontal or vertical, but that protocol is an algorithm, a proscription for structure whose form of appearance may be any number of different diagrams or shapes.
The simplest network diagram is the centralized network (see figure 1.1). Centralized networks are hierarchical. They operate with a single authorita- tive hub. Each radial node, or branch of the hierarchy, is subordinate to the central hub. All activity travels from center to periphery. No peripheral node is connected to any other node. Centralized networks may have more than one branch extending out from the center, but at each level of the hierarchy power is wielded by the top over the bottom. 


Read the Physical Media chapter on PDF

Protocol...is a book on computer science written by someone who's not a computer scientist, and that's a good thing."
—Gary Singh, Metro

"Galloway is one of the very few people who are equally well versed in poststructuralist cultural theory and computer programming."
—Steven Shaviro, The Pinocchio Theory Weblog

"An engaging methodological hybrid of the Frankfurt School and UNIX for Dummies.... Galloway brings the uncool question of morality back into critical thinking."
—Ed Halter, The Village Voice

Gianni Vattimo: Interrogazione sulle attività USA e UE di data mining (19.03.2012 Parlamento Europeo di Strasburgo)

Interrogazione con richiesta di risposta scritta E-002428/2012 alla Commissione Articolo 117 del regolamento Gianni Vattimo (ALDE) 

Oggetto: Global Intelligence Files di WikiLeaks, attività generalizzate di data mining da parte degli Stati Uniti e dell'UE, e profiling di cittadini dell'UE 


Il 27 febbraio 2012 WikiLeaks ha lanciato "The Global Intelligence Files", da cui è emerso che: 
1. Le autorità di contrasto statunitensi si avvalgono di aziende private al fine di monitorare, analizzare e contrastare le attività di attivisti e manifestanti pacifici, ad esempio tramite Stratfor, un'azienda che fornisce servizi riservati di intelligence a grandi società e alle agenzie governative interessate, con le quali l'azienda intrattiene relazioni strette (ex dipendenti del governo USA lavorano adesso per la Stratfor) così come le intrattiene con importanti imprese mediatiche (tra cui la Reuters). 


2. Palantir, una società fondata dall'azienda della CIA In-Q-Tel1, fornisce alle autorità statunitensi i software per collegare i dati provenienti da diverse basi dati (dati sul codice di prenotazione, dati bancari, dati relativi a trasferimenti finanziari, dati sull'ubicazione e sulle comunicazioni) con dati da fonte aperta (quali Twitter e Facebook) al fine di individuare, sulla base di modelli di un non meglio definito "comportamento sospetto", le persone che presentano un "rischio". 3. Facebook, a quanto si afferma, è finanziato dalla CIA tramite altre aziende e amministratori che hanno ricevuto o ricevono fondi per mezzo di In-Q-Tel. Inoltre il Dipartimento per la Sicurezza interna (DHS) ha dato incarico all'azienda privata General Dynamics di monitorare i media e i social media al fine di attuare la propria politica2; ciò ha determinato, ad esempio, l'arresto, l'interrogatorio e l'espulsione di due innocenti turisti dell'UE, Leigh Van Bryan ed Emily Bunting, per via di alcune battute su Twitter


3. Viene riferito che Europol impiega intelligence da fonte aperta e processi di data mining (estrazione di dati) e di profiling (profilazione) basati sui pacchetti software I2 e Themis4, ed è cliente di Orgnet.com, un'azienda che fornisce "software e servizi per l'analisi dei social network". 


Inoltre, in relazione alla revisione del regolamento su Europol, un funzionario della Commissione ha annunciato progetti volti a consentire operazioni che comportano "ricerche su Internet" da parte di Europol. È la Commissione a conoscenza delle questioni summenzionate? Ritiene che le situazioni descritte siano compatibili con la direttiva 95/46/CE, del 24 ottobre 1995, con la Carta dei diritti fondamentali e con la Convenzione europea dei diritti dell'uomo? Quali provvedimenti intende adottare per garantire che i dati personali dei cittadini dell'UE non siano oggetto di abusi da parte di aziende private statunitensi e autorità di contrasto mediante attività generalizzate di data mining e profiling? Intende chiedere informazioni circa i criteri applicati e le persone che sono considerate un "pericolo", nonché difendere i diritti dei cittadini dell'UE? Che cosa ha fatto per difendere i diritti dei cittadini europei Leigh Van Bryan ed Emily Bunting? Intende esprimere la sua preoccupazione in merito a tale incidente? Ritiene che la proposta di estensione del mandato di Europol sia compatibile con i trattati? Quali provvedimenti intende adottare per garantire che Europol e gli Stati membri non seguano questa prassi preoccupante di spiare segretamente le vite private dei cittadini? 


1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies 
2 http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/privacy/privacy_pia_ops_publiclyavailablesocialmedia.pdf 
3 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2093796/Emily-Bunting-Leigh-Van-Bryan-UK-tourists-arrested-destroy-America-Twitter-jokes.html#ixzz1nmxPbsDQ 
4 http://www.statewatch.org/news/2012/feb/eu-profiling-and-europol-question.pdf


Read more on Vattimo's blog

Israel 'faces isolation' as new border fence is erected - A frontier fence is being erected at high speed along the 150-mile boundary between the Sinai and Negev deserts. Once it is finished, Israel will be almost completely enclosed by steel, barbed wire and concrete, leaving only the southern border with Jordan between the Dead and Red Seas without a physical barrier by Harriet Sherwood @ The Guardian 27.03.2012

Un nuovo caso (siriano) di Sorvegliare e Punire

Alla repressione delle rivolte in Siria starebbe dando il suo contribuito anche un'azienda italiana con sede nel varesino, la Area spa, attiva dal 1996 e specializzata nel settore della sorveglianza. Secondo quanto riferisce Bloomberg, squadre di tecnici della società sono giunte quest'anno a Damasco, in piena escalation delle violenze (più di tremila vittime finora). E sotto la guida dei servizi di intelligence siriani sono impegnate a installare un sofisticato sistema per intercettare, leggere e catalogare ogni email o altra comunicazione in entrata o in uscita dal Paese. Ben più intrusivo, dunque, del semplice dispositivo per bloccare i siti web.
Il sistema, nome in codice "Asfador", attualmente in fase di test, consentirà di monitorare in tempo reale ogni comunicazione, disegnando grafici che mostrino la mappa dei network virtuali di ogni cittadino. Asfador sarebbe l'uomo che, secondo le fonti interpellate da Bloomberg, avrebbe contattato Area nel 2008, proponendo l'accordo (del valore di oltre 13 milioni di euro) con la compagnia statale (e principale operatore) Syrian Telecommunication Establishment. Senza l'ausilio della società italiana, la Syrian Telecom avrebbe infatti potuto controllare solo una parte delle comunicazioni del Paese, e non tutto il traffico internet. Area ha chiuso l'affare nel 2009. E lo scorso febbraio una prima nave carica di computer e altre tecnologie ha attraccato nel porto di Latakia. (...)


Maggiori informazioni: articolo ilsole24ore di Dario Acquaro