If a country wants to badly enough, it can harness technology to repress and watch its people.
If tech companies want to badly enough, they can sell whatever the Hell they want to those regimes.
We've all heard about the Chinese "Great Firewall" and their attempts to pollute all new PCs sold in the country with special 'security' software. Well, thanks to two major Western tech companies, Iran is more competent and equally determined to ensure that their people have no internetworking communication with the outside world.
From the WSJ:
The Iranian regime has developed, with the assistance of European telecommunications companies, one of the world's most sophisticated mechanisms for controlling and censoring the Internet, allowing it to examine the content of individual online communications on a massive scale.
Interviews with technology experts in Iran and outside the country say Iranian efforts at monitoring Internet information go well beyond blocking access to Web sites or severing Internet connections.
Because of the incredibly powerful multicore processing technology we now have, companies such as Nokia and Siemens design and build system boards and network interface cards that enable far more powerful packet inspection than ever before.
In the values-neutral tech industry, using deep packet inspection to gather information about individual Internet users for tracking and surveillance is just fine. Since Iran has a telecom monopoly, it's relatively easy for the regime to monitor not only landline phone and Internet traffic, but also cell phone traffic.
The monitoring capability was provided, at least in part, by a joint venture of Siemens AG, the German conglomerate, and Nokia Corp., the Finnish cellphone company, in the second half of 2008, Ben Roome, a spokesman for the joint venture, confirmed.
The "monitoring center," installed within the government's telecom monopoly, was part of a larger contract with Iran that included mobile-phone networking technology, Mr. Roome said.
"If you sell networks, you also, intrinsically, sell the capability to intercept any communication that runs over them," said Mr. Roome.
People in Iran have noticed that their Internet connections have slowed dramatically since their last "election." As more equipment comes on line to inspect and analyze packets, network performance typically slows to a crawl.
Iran is "now drilling into what the population is trying to say," said Bradley Anstis, director of technical strategy with Marshal8e6 Inc., an Internet security company in Orange, Calif. He and other experts interviewed have examined Internet traffic flows in and out of Iran that show characteristics of content inspection, among other measures. "This looks like a step beyond what any other country is doing, including China."
Every tech company in Silicon Valley falls all over itself to sell the tools of oppression to the Chinese government and to any other willing buyer. Cisco, Microsoft, Juniper, Google, ad nauseum.
The problem is that the United States has been asleep at the switch for the last 15 years regarding diplomatic exchanges, export controls and use restrictions regarding recently-developed technologies that may often be used for benign purposes (protecting an enterprise network from attacks) but that also can be used to repress and harass people in authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.
American tech companies face some restrictions regarding encryption algorithms, which are considered a munition. However, no such restrictions exist regarding more recent technologies such as multi-processor-driven deep packet inspection. For most of the Clinton Administration, and all of George Bush's administration, technology was largely ignored as a potential tool for undermining peoples' freedom.
It's time this lack of policy was remedied - immediately. If Obama wants to do something meaningful in response to Iran's attempting to use this technology to prevent international scrutiny of its brutal hijacking of an election and the repression of its people, an announcement or a policy proposal to bring packet inspection technologies into regulatory and diplomatic frameworks should be done.
Unfortunately, it looks like Obama's so-called Tech Czar, Vivek Kundra, won't be involved.
And, for more information on repression through technology, and what you might be able to do to help, please visit the Open Net Initiative site.