According to Jillian York on Huffington Post, LinkedIn users in Syria had their accounts deleted, then restored, based on what Kay Luo, spokesman for the company, called “human error” which “led to over compliance with respect to export controls.”

The deletion was based on United States sanctions against Syria. (LinkedIn is a U.S. company.) Other countries effected by similar sanctions, and which have been denied access to LinkedIn, include Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Sudan.

The sanctions against Syria in particular apply to exports and reexports, including software. Specifically, U.S. companies are prohibited from providing “operation” technology and software, “sales” technology, and software updates.

Since the sanctions were enacted, a number of Web-based companies have had to carefully examine their terms of service and restrict users from accessing certain areas of sites. Google, for example, allows Syrian users to access Gmail and iGoogle, but not Google Gears or Gmail video chat. Facebook, though filtered by Syrian ISPs, offers Syria as a location option, and allows users to access its services. Only companies such as Amazon.com, which sells books and other products by mail, and GoDaddy.com, which offers domain names, have been forced to prohibit Syrian use altogether.

I have asked for clarification from Ms. Luo via Twitter.

Update: I can access the site now and it appears that Sudan’s “National Telecommunications Corporation” has instituted the block. The fact that some Sudanese can still visit YouTube looks to be because there is at least one ISP, Canar, that is not directly controlled by the NTC.

The use of social media sites by the politically-minded in recent demonstrations is probably behind the block. There is now a Facebook group for unblocking YouTube in Sudan. As of Tuesday morning there are 495 members.

***

Victor sends us a link to a story on YouTube being “partially blocked” in the Sudan. Unfortunately, the link won’t load for me. Nor does the GVO site in general.

Can anyone verify this?

The focus of the CPB is bloggers. Not journalists, not activists, not those who run bulletin boards. The reason for that is that, even now, if a blogger gets in trouble he or she is more likely to get attention if he or she is a journalist or a “dissident” instead of “just” a blogger. However, I acknowledge that the division between bloggers and other electronic communicators is a bit artificial. So, we will cover things like the imprisonment of the New Youth 4 and news about limitations on the Internet as a whole. We’ll continue to focus on bloggers, though, considering them the “hub” of our little wheel.

That said, I wanted to immediately illustrate that this rule is a guideline rather, by telling you about an archaeologist, Dr. Muhammad Jalal Hashim, who’s been arrested in the Sudan. The news came from Egyptology News. EN quotes from the Sudan Times, who published the appeal to the Sudanese government by the Sudan Human Rights Organization-Cairo Branch (SHRO-Cairo).

Archaeologist Jalal is a human rights activist who has been critically voicing the deep irrevocable protest of the Kajbar (Kajabar) people in the Northern Province of Sudan against the government’s dam construction in the area that will inevitably destroy the national treasures and all sites of the ancient Nubia archaeology, as well as forcing a new Diaspora for the natives of the area; thus disrupting the social fabric of the whole population.

The Organization is deeply concerned that the top officials of the government’s legal security organs abused their constitutional jobs to keep, against the Interim Constitution, Dr. Jalal in unrestricted unlawful custody. Led by these officials, the authorities aimed to silence Dr. Jalal’s significant contributions in the increasing public protest of Kajbar against the dam.

Join SHRO-Cairo in calling for the doctor’s release.