Boeing helped Egyptian dictatorship’s Internet crackdown

This video is called Egypt’s cyber-crackdown aided by US company.

From Israel National News:

Egypt’s Internet Crackdown ‘Had US Help’

by INN Staff

A California-based company helped Egypt surreptitiously inspect internet messaging by protesters since the beginning of the uprising in Cairo and other cities, according to an advocacy group.

“Free Press” says the firm, Narus, located in Sunnyvale, Ca., provided Telecom Egypt with the technology enabling government security forces to “peek in” on internet traffic from browsers, emails, Twitter and Facebook posts.

Network providers have used so-called “deep packet inspection” (DPI) software for years in order to examine the bits of digital information, called packets, that make up an email or other transmission, in order to find spam, computer viruses, and other malicious code on their systems.

“Anything that comes through (an Internet protocol network), we can record. We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their [Voice Over Internet Protocol] calls,” Narus Vice President of Marketing Steve Bannerman told Wired Magazine.

Narus is owned by aircraft and arms-maker Boeing.

But Free Press claims the Egyptian government’s alleged use of such technology to read messages and even track cellphone users via GPS coordinates and SMS messaging was an infraction of the protesters’ human rights.

“What we are seeing in Egypt is a frightening example of how the power of technology can be abused,” Free Press Campaign Director Timothy Karr said.

Robert Fisk: Gutless U.S. Reaction to Egypt: Democracy NOW! interview met Robert Fisk: here.

Tunisian police fired at an angry crowd of 1,000 demonstrators outside a police station in the north-western town of Kef on Saturday, killing two people and injuring 17 others: here.

SACP statement on the developments in Egypt and Tunisia: here.