WASHINGTON, April 23: US President Barack Obama on Monday ordered new sanctions on Syria and Iran and the “digital guns for hire” who help them oppress their people with surveillance software and monitoring technology.

Obama announced additions to the pile of US sanctions already faced by the two governments as part of a wider effort to crack down on human rights abuses, atrocities and genocide, at a speech at the US Holocaust Museum.

The measures will hit the two governments but also companies that help create systems that track or monitor their people for killing, torture or other abuses and prevent individuals involved from entering the United States.

“I’ve signed an executive order that authorises new sanctions against the Syrian government and Iran and those that abet them for using technologies to monitor and track and target citizens for violence,” Obama said.

“These technologies should be in place to empower citizens, not to repress them.

“It’s one more step that we can take toward the day that we know will come, the end of the Assad regime that has brutalized the Syrian people, and allow the Syrian people to chart their own destiny.”

The move blocks the property and interests of people under US jurisdiction who have participated in aiding the Syrian and Iranian governments and suspends their right of entry into the United States.

It targets those who have sold, leased or otherwise provided goods, services or technology to Iran or Syria likely to be used to help disrupt, monitor or track individuals through computer of Internet networks.

Since the onset of the Arab Spring, a number of firms in Western nations have been accused of supplying technology and software to repressive regimes, which has been used to track demonstrators and dissidents.

Technology has been used by security forces to disrupt demonstrators who use mobile phones, text messages and social media like Twitter and Facebook to assemble and organise protests.

Last year, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged Internet firms to avoid offering the “tools of oppression” to authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes.

She warned some companies had turned over sensitive information to governments about dissidents or shut down social networking accounts of activists involved in political debate.

“When companies sell surveillance equipment to the security agency of a Syria, or Iran, or in past times (former Libyan leader Muammar) Qadhafi there can be no doubt that it will be used to violate rights,” she said.—AFP