Antoine Champagne at Counterpunch reports how Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime censors the internet, and retrieves logins and passwords of political opponents emails or Facebook and Twitter pages. "The technology is innocuously named 'deep packet inspection' (DPI). When someone sends an email, a series of servers relays it to its destination. Each server sends the message on to the next, looking only at the recipient’s address, and not at the contents," writes Champagne. The report implies the industry is growing. "The recent Wikileaks publication of numerous internal documents from these companies [making the spying equipment] shows that monitoring communication networks is, 'a secret new industry spanning 25 countries.... In traditional spy stories, intelligence agencies like MI5 bug the phone of one or two people of interest. In the last 10 years systems of indiscriminate, mass surveillance have become the norm.' A little earlier The Wall Street Journal had published more than 200 marketing documents from 36 companies offering the U.S. anti-terrorist agency various surveillance and computer hacking tools," he reports. See the full story in Counterpunch.