WASHINGTON (AFP) ― U.S. President Barack Obama 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 authorizes 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 property and interests of people under U.S. 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 or Internet networks.

Since the onset of the Arab Spring, a number of Western firms 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 organize protests.

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