A U.S. Corporation's Role in Egypt's Brutal Crackdown

Look no further than Egypt, where the Mubarak regime today reportedly shut down internet and cellphone communications — a troubling predictor of the fierce crackdown that has followed.

What’s even more troubling is news that one U.S. company is aiding Egypt’s harsh response through sales of technology that makes this repression possible.

The internet’s favorite offspring — Facebook, Twitter 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.

High-tech spying

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 cellphone 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 is a U.S. firm, Narus of Sunnyvale, California, which has sold Telecom Egypt “real-time traffic intelligence” equipment.

Now owned by Boeing, Narus 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 that is allegedly used by the NSA and other entities to perform mass surveillance and monitoring of public and corporate online 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. “We can reconstruct all of their emails along with attachments, see what webpages 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 regimes in Burma, China and Iran have sought out this “internet-enhancing” technology 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 Cisco (U.S.), Procera Networks (U.S.), Allot (Israel), Ixia (U.S.), AdvancedIO (Canada) and Sandvine (Canada), among others.

These companies typically partner with ISPs to insert DPI along the main arteries of the web. All online 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.

Rare bipartisan consensus

Both 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 Action Fund’s 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, Congress ought to establish clear criteria for authorizing the use of such surveillance 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.

Much has happened in the weeks since this post was first published:

• I appeared on Al Jazeera English . They sent a reporter to the Narus offices only to be turned away at the door. Apparently Narus believes that this issue will go away by simply ignoring the many media inquiries. (Reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle and the Seattle Times have told me that Narus has refused to respond to their inquiries as well.)

• This article in the Feb. 6 Daily Mail indicates that the Egyptian state police is tracking activist Twitter and Facebook accounts.

• Gordon Crovitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “Western telecommunications companies were instrumental in closing off the internet in the country almost entirely,” forced to abide by Egyptian telecom law that “gives the country access to networks during a state of emergency.”

• Members of Congress and other government officials became increasingly alarmed following my reporting on Narus and Egyptian surveillance technology. In March 2011, during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, Reps. Chris Smith (R–New Jersey) and Bill Keating (D–Massachusetts) grilled Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg on the sale of this internet-spying technology to an Egyptian internet provider controlled by the Mubarak regime. Rep. Smith cited my reporting and demanded an explanation from the State Department.