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Out of Egypt Censorship, US Tech Export Under Fire
AndyAndyAndyAndy writes "After it was exposed that American firm Narus had sold Egypt the Deep Packet Inspection equipment used to spy on and censor its citizens, the US House Committee on Foreign Relations held a hearing where Reps. Chris Smith and Bill Keating '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.' It seems there is now a push for stronger controls and monitoring for technology exports 'that would provide a national strategy to prevent the use of American technology from being used by human rights abusers.'"
Several readers have noted that Hosni Mubarak has now stepped down as president of Egypt. Control of the country's affairs has been passed to the high council of its armed forces, which has some journalists and bloggers worried.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
It seems there is now a push for stronger controls and monitoring for technology exports 'that would provide a national strategy to prevent the use of American technology from being used by human rights abusers.'"
I can't see that getting through unless the small print includes a special exception for Israel.
Based on how well the Egyptian army has handled itself these past few weeks and how they tried to stay as independent as possible I think it may actually be a GOOD thing that they are taking over for now. Better the army than the Muslim Brotherhood.
According to my Egyptian friends and from common knowledge of the region, the people in general are not against a military run country in the interim between dictatorship and democracy. It assures stability while also assuring that things are changing. The culture of Egypt is very intertwined with the military, almost every family has at least one person actively serving, so when they chant "The military and the people are one" they aren't being selective as to exactly who in the military they're talking about. The military up to this point was already seen and acted as an unbiased arbitrator not influenced by politics. As has been stated, they are there to protect Egypt and the people of Egypt and will not spill Egyptian blood. They're probably the very best group to hold the country together in the potentially long process of redrafting a constitution and instituting a democratic system.
The US is the only one allowed to use this tech to abuse human rights, and it really doesn't want to risk losing its lead in technology used for spying on citizens.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
This coming from the government that invented the PATRIOT act, national security letters and directly taps internet backbones. Do members of congress not understand what hypocrisy is or do they just not care?
From http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/02/07/133503696/the-friday-podcast-egypts-military-inc "So far, the Egyptian military has largely sided with the protesters in the streets of Cairo. This is not only because the military supports the people; it's also because the military sells the people lots of stuff."
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
...given the billions of dollars in military aid and training the USA has offered to Mubarak's regime - the teargas branded "made in USA" was just the obvious part.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Something neither the anti-obama ranters nor the liberals "get" is that in the long run, America is only there for the Suez Canal, and would support whoever it takes to keep oil flowing through it. When the public gets around to electing someone else, we'll support them too, unless they stop keeping the Canal open again, in which case we take back all their toys.
The Muslim Brotherhood are not fanatics. They are the real equivalent of our Southern Baptists, stuffy old conservative men who want a society centered on religion. They have always condemned violence, and continually speak out against all terrorism. I wouldn't want to see them elected any more than I want our country ruled by Southern Baptists, but they are not radical terrorist Muslims. Oh, you will find some people claiming they are, but those are the same people who would believe a Muslim stamp collecting club was a terrorist organization. You won't find Al Qaeda praising the Muslim Brotherhood, indeed, all radical Muslims condemn it as too moderate.
As I said, i wouldn't want to see them elected, not because they would attack Israel, or turn against us, but they might require women to wear Burkhas and a lot of them seem quite keen on stoning adulterers. Not good, but not suicide bombers, either.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Agreed! Why does this news (that Mubarak just stepped down) only get a footnote to a small news story? Surely nerds will think this is big news as well.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Wait a minute: "prevent the use... from being used"? So they can use it, but they can't use using it?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Deep packet inspection has been around for several (technology) generations. I don't fault the software company for selling it to anyone, if they didn't some other software vendor would have (or the Egyptian authorities would have rolled their own). The demand was there, and it was going to be filled one way or the other. The real problem I see is that the base communication protocols haven't been encrypted, even after many years of evidence that it's needed. 100% of traffic should go over SSL, or something stringer with a distributed authentication scheme, rather than having a centralized authority like Verisign holding all the root keys.
"now a push for stronger controls and monitoring for technology exports 'that would provide a national strategy to prevent the use of American technology from being used by human rights abusers.'"
Where is the grilling of our own country's use of this technology to spy on our citizens? Yeah, I thought so, not a single word. That'd be looking in the past and we never do that. Nope never...
Honestly, this is consistent with what the US has been saying for the past 10 years on any human rights abuse. We've continued to rack up our own abuses and as long as the targets are "terrorists" or "Muslims" or whatever the current boogeyman, it's OK if the US does these things. Meanwhile, out of the other side of our mouth, while we continue these abusive and repressive tactics, we have the gall to point the finger at other countries, ones who we even have supported and ASKED to do our repression because it gives the US some value, we point our finger and tsk tsk tsk, spying, invasion of privacy, these are the things of tyrants and dictators... let the sound of freedom ring...
Nope, not even a hint of irony there...
There's a historical reason why SSL is not more common: because the hierarchy of certificate trust was not propagated through the hierarchy of DNS. That's the logical thing to do: If you control the domain name servers for your own domain, you can publish your own public keys. It would have been free and open, reducing the barrier of entry to practically zero. Instead, administrators have been forced to establish the relationship between certificates and DNS names using a commercial third party. Instead of extending the DNS protocol, we pay people to perform a workaround.
This was a huge mistake that basically led to companies like Verisign extorting billions of dollars in exchange for permitting web administrators to encrypt traffic to their sites. What's brilliant is that Verisign owns a significant chunk of the root DNS name servers! It's a conflict of interest for them to enable a free and open hierarchy of trust based on DNS, because it would eliminate most of their business overnight.
That, right there, is corporate corruption on a billion dollar scale that is directly detrimental to human rights, privacy, and information safety.
I wonder how many people have been executed or imprisoned due to Verisign's stifling of internet cryptography enabling corrupt governments to spy on their citizens?