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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.
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
...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
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?