The open Internet's role in popular uprising is now undisputed. Look no further than Egypt, where the Mubarak regime today reportedly shut down Internet and cell phone communications -- a troubling predictor of the fierce crackdown that has followed.
What's even more troubling is news that one American company is aiding Egypt's harsh response through sales of technology that makes this repression possible.
The Internet's favorite offspring -- Twitter, Facebook and YouTube -- are now heralded on CNN, BBC and Fox News as flag-bearers for a new era of citizen journalism and activism. (More and more these same news organizations have abandoned their own, more traditional means of newsgathering to troll social media for breaking information.)
But the open Internet's power cuts both ways: The tools that connect, organize and empower protesters can also be used to hunt them down.
Telecom Egypt, the nation's dominant phone and Internet service provider, is a state-run enterprise, which made it easy on Friday morning for authorities to pull the plug and plunge much of the nation into digital darkness.
Moreover, Egypt also has the ability to spy on Internet and cell phone users, by opening their communication packets and reading their contents. Iran used similar methods during the 2009 unrest to track, imprison and in some cases, "disappear" truckloads of cyber-dissidents.
The companies that profit from sales of this technology need to be held to a higher standard. One in particular is an American firm, Narus of Sunnyvale, Calif., which has sold Telecom Egypt "real-time traffic intelligence" equipment.
Narus, now owned by Boeing, was founded in 1997 by Israeli security experts to create and sell mass surveillance systems for governments and large corporate clients.
The company is best known for creating NarusInsight, a supercomputer system which is allegedly used by the National Security Agency and other entities to perform mass, real-time surveillance and monitoring of public and corporate Internet communications in real time.
Narus provides Egypt Telecom with Deep Packet Inspection equipment (DPI), a content-filtering technology that allows network managers to inspect, track and target content from users of the Internet and mobile phones, as it passes through routers on the information superhighway.
Other Narus global customers include the national telecommunications authorities in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia -- two countries that regularly register alongside Egypt near the bottom of Human Rights Watch's world report.
"Anything that comes through (an Internet protocol network), we can record," Steve Bannerman, Narus' marketing vice president, once boasted to Wired about the service. "We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on; we can reconstruct their (Voice Over Internet Protocol) calls."
Other North American and European companies are selling DPI to enable their business customers "to see, manage and monetize individual flows to individual subscribers." But this "Internet-enhancing" technology has been sought out by regimes in Iran, China and Burma for more brutal purposes.
In addition to Narus, there are a number of companies, including many others in the United States, that produce and traffic in similar spying and control technology. This list of DPI providers includes Procera Networks (USA), Allot (Israel), Ixia (USA), AdvancedIO (Canada) and Sandvine (Canada), among others.
These companies typically partner with Internet Service Providers to insert DPI along the main arteries of the Web. All Net traffic in and out of Iran, for example, travels through one portal -- the Telecommunications Company of Iran -- which facilitates the use of DPI.
When commercial network operators use DPI, the privacy of Internet users is compromised. But in government hands, the use of DPI can crush dissent and lead to human rights violations.
Setting the Bar High for DPI Sales
Even Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on this problem.
"Internet censorship is a real challenge, and not one any particular industry -- much less any single company -- can tackle on its own, " Rep. Mary Bono Mack wrote in a 2009 letter to Rep. Henry Waxman, then chair of the House Commerce Committee. "Efforts to promote freedom of expression and to limit the impact of censorship require both private and public sector engagement."
Earlier this week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged Egypt's government "not to prevent peaceful protests or block communications, including on social media."
Bono Mack's letter and Clinton's statement echo Free Press' call for a congressional inquiry into the issue. But this is just a start.
Before DPI becomes more widely deployed around the world and at home, the Congress ought to establish clear criteria for authorizing the use of such surveillance and control technologies.
The power to control the Internet and the resulting harm to democracy are so disturbing that the threshold for using DPI must be very high.
Today we're seeing the grave dangers of this technology unfold in real time on the streets of Cairo.
Correction: An earlier version of this post erroneously included Camiant and Zeguma Systems on a list of DPI providers. Both have been removed from this list. Camiant has partnered with Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) companies to provide "policy control solutions" that enable network operators "to better control and manage network usage," according to 2009 press reports. Zeguma Systems went out of business in 2010.
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Richard Grenell: Obama-Biden Support Mubarak, the Dictator
Call your congressman, president and other officials before you call this company.
http://www.infonetics.com/pr/2010/DPI-Deep-Packet-Inspection-Market-Highlights.asp
Other vendors include Arbor, Bivio, CloudShield, Procera, Narus, NIKSUN, Sandvine, and Qosmos, according to Infonetics. While Narus is now owned by Boeing it still runs under its own corporate identity. Camiant was bought out by Tekelec, which is in the business of partnering with DPI firms to provide "policy control solutions” that enable network operators “to better control and manage network usage.”
LetsHearTheTruth 3 hours ago (11:30 AM) 113 Fans
Re: "You could read the story somewhat differently, and say that all this high-tech communications technology has basically helped to found what amounts to a digital insurgency, a rebellion against government hosted online".
Reply: You talk about that, like it is a BAD thing!
Seriously, if you talk to people from other countries, they find it laughable how the U.S. preaches freedom and democracy, yet has the most politically uninformed (and/or mis-informed) citizenry in the developed world. >>>AMEN to the truth of the preceding statement ... from an informed American citizen who has to work at it, for reasons cited by Let's Hear the Truth!!>>snipped
As for the need to track for purposes of managing bandwidth; expand the bandwidth so that it is not necessary. The present situation, managed artificial scarcity, exists to maximize profits and provide an excuse for governments to enforce surveillance on a scale never imagined by Orwell in his darkest nightmares or Stalin's maddest dreams. There is enormous profit in the current system being used to buy up providers and competitors, instead of expanding the current capacity so that everyone can eat all they wish. You don't become a billionaire by providing vital communications bandwidth; you become a billionaire by throttling bandwidth to maximize profits. Regulate the profits and force them to expand their bandwidth to necessary levels.
If we allow this nonsensical excuse, bandwidth will never expand to the level we need, prices will go up, providers will "manage" us to an inch of our lives, and government/corporate power will monitor our every move until the day we die, and they will never, ever go away.
Though these communication tools do make it easier for the people to become deeply aware of the differences to ordinary day to day life of living under a dictator vs living under a responsive government, they do not seem to be needed to organise things in a truly popular uprising (they are a great tool if you want to make a small group's protests seem to be a popular uprising, but that is a different matter).
Indeed, that the protests grew larger and the protesters more determined WHILE all these tools were blocked pretty much shows that the narrative is overblown, but I don't see that affecting the belief in that narrative (it sort of let's Americans feel a sense of proud ownership of the protests, glossing over that these protests are against things done with the support of Americans)
It may be more comfortable for Americans to put the blame on 'corporations' (and the small group of executives and important shareholders that shape their policies) and so minimise the amount of blame that you put on the US government (and the citizens who shape its policy, which happens to be ALL Americans), but it is somewhat dishonest.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/exclusive-google-cia/
Funny how no one in Washington is talking bad about this teamup. The days of "Minority Report" are getting closer and closer in the good 'ole US of A.
Not all that is digital is automatically good, and part of what's evolved has been the digital surveillance state, where news travels the world in seconds, unvarnished, uncut, unedited. So, what happens when you shut off this globe-trotting 'nerve center'? Do people come back to reality? Come down off the information 'high', and start thinking for themselves, again? How about here, in the US? How does the online world now affect and impact our society, and what would happen tomorrow if that little 10-year-old hacker in Foreigncountrystan gets lucky and unleashes the Magic Network-killing Virus? (Or, maybe he's a little older than that, and in cahoots with government, somehow). I think, at some point, there's some hard questions to be asked about all the telco stuff, is all.
Reply: You talk about that, like it is a BAD thing!
Seriously, if you talk to people from other countries, they find it laughable how the U.S. preaches freedom and democracy, yet has the most politically uninformed (and/or mis-informed) citizenry in the developed world. The internet is actually helping CURE that, which is what repressive and abusive governments MOST FEAR.
There seems to be a divide here on Huffpost, and your first sentence seems to illustrate it really well. I would label that, as a divide between the Authoritarians, and the anti-Authoritarians.
The Authoritarians "trust" our government, and don't really seem to have a problem with the fact that our mainstream media is very deferential, and avoids any real, fact-based discussions, which might actually educate the public.
Simultaneously, our "partisan media", has a lot of misinformation, which, again, works to leave the public uneducated to such a degree, they are unable to separate fact from fiction.
The idea that the public should remain unaware of the truth, while the government spies on the public ("for it's own good"), favors an ever more powerful and corrupt U.S. government.
Authoritarians also tend to favor torture, warrantless spying, and lack of accountability of our lobbyist-government-banker class, while mistrusting the citizenry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights
The question is: What will you do if your government starts to harass you!
I believe that free speech is a natural right for all people.
And since when is Egypt a repressive country? Seems freer than China to me, we shouldn't sell China anything by these standards. Bogus.
Also, the Party leads China, not a person. And that has outlasted Mubarak.