In marking Holocaust Remembrance Day , President Obama on Monday announced new sanctions targeting governments that use new technologies, such as cell phone and internet tracking, to carry out human rights abuses. The sanctions were aimed mostly at Iran and Syria, who have used new technologies to track dissidents.

“We need to be doing everything we can to prevent and respond to these kinds of atrocities — because national sovereignty is never a license to slaughter your people,” Obama said in a speech at the holocaust Museum in Washington. “These technologies should be in place to empower citizens, not to repress them.  And 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.”