It’s Time to Sanction Repression Profiteers
There should be a three-track program to assist these activists. Firstly, the U.S. must declare that any company which sells such technology to repressive governments is subject to sanctioning by the U.S. government and its allies. Every effort should be made to publicize the transgressions of companies that have made such sales, perhaps through a congressional report, to pressure them to immediately cease such sales and make anti-censorship programs available to those they helped oppress.
Already, a very good bi-partisan bill has been put forth by Senator Mark Kirk and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand to support the Iranian opposition. It can serve as a model for a more general bill. The bill approves the sanctioning of any company that sells items used for suppression of dissent to the Iranian regime. This includes not just tools for tracking communication and Internet activity, but equipment used by the security agencies like sniper rifles, water cannons, and batons. It also requires a “comprehensive strategy to promote Internet freedom in Iran.”
The second track of the program should provide dissidents with equipment that can defeat filtering and monitoring programs. Democratic forces must be given the ability to anonymously organize and break the information blockade imposed upon them. The funding can come out of the contributions of the U.S. and its allies to the $40 billion aid package to the Arab Spring. Officials can also help non-profit organizations dedicated to the cause raise money specifically for this effort. Sometimes, too much emphasis is put on using government revenues. American citizens are willing to donate to causes like these if asked.
The third track would be an authorization for the CIA and friendly intelligence services to actively undermine the Internet monitoring activities of regimes like those in Iran and Syria. The services can help facilitate the passage of anti-monitoring equipment into these territories and, more simply, target systems used to crush dissent. The systems can be confused, manipulated, or altogether disabled. If the West was able to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program with the Stuxnet virus, then this should be a piece of cake.
Selling equipment specifically designed to deny human rights to oppressive governments is the height of selfishness and immorality. These companies cannot be allowed to get away with it.
In a sane world, everything in this article would be obvious, and frankly we wouldn’t have a need for this, because no company would dare stick its nose outdoors after selling tools like this to a repressive regime. But that’s in a sane world, not ours…
I agree with the point of the article, but don’t think the article is effective.
What companies are involved and how are people going to find out who is involved? Furthermore people are going to scan the article looking for names of the firms involved. Seimens and Nokia are mentioned as bad players, and the need to boycott companies who do this, the next paragraph starts out “take skype” – very poor postioning. This strongly creates the impression that Skype is one of the bad firms. The reader needs to go through the whole paragraph to determine that the original impression created by the poor postioning, is not correct.
I didn’t get a clear idea of exactly what steps should be taken to stop companies who engage in these activiies.
The article does have a point, but shouldn’t it be time for Skype, Hotmail, Google, and Yahoo to start modernizing their software to prevent hackers from getting into their systems? After all, this game of cat-and-mouse has been going on for years and it’s always up to the manufacturer to come up with better ways of preventing people from hacking into their systems. People who copy software programs onto computers without buying them are breaking the law all the time, but you don’t really hear much about the Government cracking down on that. So it’s really up to the manufacturer to somehow stop this from happening through safeguards within the software itself.
If you wait for the government to do something (let alone enforce one of its own laws), you’ll die of old age. The manufacturers of the software will get better results if they build better firewalls to prevent this kind of stuff from happening.
The difference between then and now is that you have “legitimate” businesses selling commercial products for breaking their security. It started with them offering the technology to employers for monitoring their networks. It was only natural that they’d sell it to repressive regimes.
You should note, however, that part of the hacking mentioned in the article was against webmail. That might have been nothing more than a man-in-the-middle attack on the SSL session, but if not, that’s disturbing that they’re not being sued by Google and Microsoft for facilitating illegal activity against their services. Note: it is illegal in the US to facilitate breaking into GMail and Hotmail even for employers because the act of gaining unauthorized access into a third party’s service exceeds the scope of the legal right to monitor your company’s network traffic.
So the author is advocating shutting down the entire economy of the US? That’s not tongue in cheek – have you been to Walmart. There’s almost nothing in there that isn’t from one of the most oppressive, murderous regimes in the entire world – China.
Treason is treason. The penaly is and should be death. If a company sends strategic technology abroad then its CEO should be prosecuted. After all, it is already against the law to do so. Where is Holder?
“There should be a three-track program to assist these activists. Firstly, the U.S. must declare that any company which sells such technology to repressive governments is subject to sanctioning by the U.S. government and its allies”
Only big companies that make much money in the United States could be coerced
to refrain from the shady business described in your article. After all Russia/China/Iran…(axis of evil) pay very well for anti-privacy software/technology. Siemens can not afford having american public opinion against them, other companies do. BTW: Germans (and europeans) don´t care about Siemens selling state-of-the-art tech to the mullahs.
“The second track of the program should provide dissidents with equipment that can defeat filtering and monitoring programs. Democratic forces must be given the ability to anonymously organize and break the information blockade imposed upon them.”
A defensive tactic, that won´t work. I thought you wanted to end the cat and mouse game, where the free world is alway two steps behind.
“The third track would be an authorization for the CIA and friendly intelligence services to actively undermine the Internet monitoring activities of regimes like those in Iran and Syria. ”
Ya that makes sense. An even better would be to also legalize attacks on any countrys/ companys IT infrastructure. Hackers are portrayed as the enemy by Clinton. Yeah, well they are not.