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Egypt’s cyber-crackdown aided by US company
How Narus, Sunnyvale Helps ME Dictatorships
Boeing/Narus Helps Egyptian Dictatorship Fight Pro-Democracy Movement
(AllGov) – The government of Egypt’s attempted crackdown on mass protests has been aided by an American firm that sells telecommunications software that allows the authoritarian regime to spy on citizens’ emails and cell phone communications.
Narus, located in Sunnyvale, California, sold the Egyptian government Deep Packet Inspection equipment, a content-filtering technology used to inspect, track and target content from users of the Internet and mobile phones.
According to a Narus executive, owners of the software can record everything that goes through the Internet in their country, allowing them to read emails and attachments, view browsing histories and even reconstruct phone calls made over VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol).
Founded in 1997 by Israeli security experts to create and sell mass surveillance systems for governments and large corporate clients, Narus is now owned by Boeing.
Egypt is not the first country to use Deep Packet Inspection equipment to spy on protestors. The government of Iran reportedly used similar technology sold to it by Siemens and Nokia to hunt down political opponents following the country’s national elections in 2009.
The Cairo government also has received help from the United Kingdom’s Vodafone Group, which complied with a request to shut down its cell phone network during the uprising.
AT&T’s Implementation of NSA Spying on American Citizens 2005
A single NarusInsight machine can monitor traffic equal to the maximum capacity (10 Gbit/s) of around 39,000 DSL lines or 195,000 telephone modems. But, in practical terms, since individual internet connections are not continually filled to capacity, the 10 Gbit/s capacity of one NarusInsight installation enables it to monitor the combined traffic of several million broadband users.
According to a company press release, the latest version of NarusInsight Intercept Suite (NIS) is “the industry’s only network traffic intelligence system that supports real-time precision targeting, capturing and reconstruction of webmail traffic… including Google Gmail, MSN Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Gawab Mail (English and Arabic versions).”
It can also perform semantic analysis of the same traffic as it is happening, in other words analyze the content, meaning, structure and significance of this entire traffic, as it is happening. The exact use of this data is not fully documented, as the public is not authorized to see what types of activities and ideas are being watched for.
(Haaretz) – Apparently not. It is very possible that Cohen and Khirman are working at a startup that nobody is willing to talk about. A stealthy startup they helped found called Cright that has lots of employees in Israel and California, and which is reportedly about to avail itself of Ukrainian development talent too. Almost nobody has heard of Cright and nobody at all, including its distinguished investors, is willing to discuss what it does.
More to follow: Internet and women’s protest in Saudi Arabia!
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
