BEHIND THE KILL SWITCH

Returning to my post on the switch-off of the Internet in Egypt on the first day of the current protests, Laura Flanders blogged an interesting piece in The Nation a couple of days ago, on the Social Media Off-Switch.

A US-based company seems to be the maker of the Internet off-switch. Tim Karr of Free Press notes the US company Narus, sited in California,  was founded in 1997 by Israeli security experts.

(Free Press is a liberal non-profit reform group who are, in their own words, "working to make media reform a bona fide political issue in America. Powerful telecommunications, cable and broadcasting companies have plenty of lobbyists to do their bidding. We're making sure the public has a seat at the table, and we're building a movement to make sure the media serve the public interest.")

As the lobbyists put it: “Narus is the leader in real-time traffic intelligence for the protection and management of large IP networks…. Used by the world’s service providers and governments, Narus has developed and patented state-of-the art algorithms to detect network anomalies and manage unwanted IP traffic. Additionally, Narus has the unique ability to precision target and fully reconstruct all types of IP traffic, including e-mail, Web mail and instant messages.”

Egypt Telecom, the state-owned communications company, are a client of Narus. Others include Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. During Iran’s protests in 2009, dissidents were tracked, imprisoned and in some cases executed by the use of what seems to have been similar technology.

Narus is owned by Boeing, the nominally US-based company that has outsourced jobs all over the world—and the US State Department has been promoting them. So I guess the US has also bought this tool for themselves - though it's obvious that any country would find this an extremely useful tool to have in times of trouble.