On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal published an important exposé of western companies that sell spying technology to repressive regimes across the Middle East and North Africa.
Reporters Steve Stecklow, Paul Sonne and Matt Bradley focus on pro-democracy activists in Egypt who discovered that the Mubarak regime had hacked into their Internet communications, including Skype phone calls, to monitor their activities in the run up to protests earlier this year.
Several of these activists were also detained by Egyptian authorities and tortured to force them to hand over online passwords. Records subsequently uncovered from the March raid of Egyptian state security headquarters reveal the extent that Mubarak's forces intercepted the online communications of those it considered to be political opponents.
The Journal reporters investigate spying technology that is being offered to regimes across the region by Western firms. And they focus on one based in the UK that had hoped to do business with Egypt.
But that's when their trail turns cold.
It may be for a lack of damning evidence, but Stecklow, Sonne and Bradley didn't report on one U.S. firm whose business in Egypt is hiding in plain sight.
And from what I have learned, their business -- to facilitate state surveillance, censorship and suppression -- is pretty ugly.
That company is Narus of Sunnyvale, Calif., which in 2006 sold Telecom Egypt "real-time traffic intelligence" equipment that can perform mass surveillance of Internet communications, including "monitoring" of the sorts of Skype communications that are profiled in The Journal story.
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 perhaps best known for creating NarusInsight, a supercomputer system which is allegedly used by the National Security Agency to tap phone conversations of U.S. citizens. But Narus also sells a system, dubbed "Hone," which sifts through billions of pieces of data on social networks so that law enforcement agencies can construct extensive digital profiles of individuals they seek to monitor.
While The Journal story briefly mentions Narus it misses one vitally important detail: Narus has sold its technology to Egypt -- a fact established by Narus' own website, which boasts extensively of business with the state-run telecommunications company Telecom Egypt.
Narus has been notoriously reluctant to speak to media about its overseas sales, but a little further digging will reveal official clients not just in Egypt but also in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and, even, Libya.
Stecklow, Sonne and Bradley instead focus on a British firm, Gamma International UK Ltd., which produces surveillance systems that allegedly can tap Skype conversations -- no simple feat given their encryption over the network.
For several months Gamma pursued a sale with the Mubarak regime, even letting Egyptian security forces demo the technology on local activists. However, that sale reportedly fell through as street protests grew.
But The Journal may have a bigger story on its hands with a California company that did close their deal with the Mubarak regime.
What role did Narus have to play in the brutal suppression of Internet activists in Egypt? Perhaps future reports from The Journal's investigative team will tell.
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