DAMASCUS, SYRIA — Small, thin and pale, with a reddish beard, Abdul-Rahman Mahaini estimates that he has stolen millions of dollars' worth of software, hacking his way into the most complex programs in the world.
For a few bucks, the Syrian programmer will unlock the security codes for any program you send him via e-mail or online chat. But don't ask him to break into your ex-girlfriend's e-mail account or steal sales data from your competitor.
After all, the 26-year-old insists, he's an ethical pirate, a devout Muslim who prays five times a day and breaks into software only because his country is under U.S. sanctions and he has little choice.
Mahaini's life revolves around a software shop that he runs on Bahsa Street, Damascus' computer market. The business is a hive of awkward, chatty and bespectacled young men asking one another for obscure software programs and the codes and serial numbers to unlock them. Their voices quiet when a stranger enters.
They seem to orbit around Mahaini and his band of deputies -- a kind of cyber-Robin Hood and his Merry Men who steal from the information haves and redistribute the loot to the have-nots.
"If you try to deprive me," he says, "I will take it from you."
Piracy cost the U.S. software industry $48 billion in potential revenue last year, up from $40 billion the year before, according to the Washington-based Business Software Alliance. The Arab world, with areas where more than 90% of the software is pirated, is a haven for hackers such as Mahaini. They're driven by profit as well as the challenge of outfoxing some of the biggest brands in the global software industry: Microsoft, Adobe, Symantec, Cisco.
But there is also a political dimension to their piracy. In Syria, which is under tight U.S. banking sanctions that make online transactions and American software sales all but impossible, the hackers consider themselves righteous heroes.
"I can understand how a hacker who is following the hacker ethic could feel that way," says Richard Ford, an associate professor of computer science at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Fla. "There's this idea among hackers of information wanting to be free and that you should have access to software tools."
In Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East, stealing or using pirated software is also viewed as part of the struggle against American power and policies seen as biased against Arabs and Islam.
