Global Internet Censorship Being Powered by U.S. Companies

A handful of U.S. companies that started making software to keep kids from watching porn in school libraries has found itself powering an authoritarian crackdown on free speech throughout the Middle East and China.

As social upheaval has spread throughout the Middle East we’ve seen governments systematically crack down on free speech to try to contain the protests. In Egypt the internet was shut off altogether for almost two weeks, and in Bahrain, Yemen, Tunisia and more, the web has been censored to block anti-government messages or any content the government deems objectionable. China, so scared that the protests might spread to their country, actually blocked the word Egypt from its social media sites in addition to the normal internet censorship it practices.

We usually think of this as a point of departure with American culture. Freedom of speech is a beloved tenet of American life, and unless we’re talking about WikiLeaks, we can’t imagine our government censoring our communications or access to information. It’s supposed to be part of the contract of American society.

But as the Wall Street Journal points out today, a small handful of American companies are actually powering the internet censorship of the Middle East and China. From the Journal:

McAfee Inc., acquired last month by Intel Corp., has provided content-filtering software used by Internet-service providers in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, according to interviews with buyers and a regional reseller. Blue Coat Systems Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., has sold hardware and technology in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar that has been used in conjunction with McAfee’s Web-filtering software and sometimes to block websites on its own.

Abul Hasan Jafery, a spokesman for one of the major ISPs in the United Arab Emirates said, “We block malware, alternative lifestyles, profanity. If something is offensive to the religion, we block it,” using software from American company Netsweeper.

Spokespeople from American web-filtering software companies deny complicity with foreign censoring efforts. What the governments do with the software once they purchase it is out of the companies’ hands, “much as Ford Motor Co. can’t decide how [its customers] are going to drive their cars,” says Scott O’Neill of Netsweeper.

But sources in the Journal suggest at at least some enabling on the part of American companies: “A regulator in Bahrain, which uses McAfee’s SmartFilter product, says the government is planning to switch soon to technology from U.S.-based Palo Alto Networks Inc. It promises to give Bahrain more blocking options and make it harder for people to circumvent censoring.”

Stranger still is that even as American companies profit from selling the censoring software abroad, the U.S. government is engaged in a battle to dodge that very same software as it’s implemented by the foreign governments who buy purchase it. Recently “the State Department has spent more than $20 million to fund software and technologies that help people in the Middle East circumvent Internet censorship that is sustained by Western technology,” reports the Journal.

Fighting the interests of one hand with the other is an American tradition almost as old as the concept of free speech itself, so I guess this quandary over global internet censorship shouldn’t be altogether surprising. But the question remains—what about the technological threats that the Wall Street Journal hasn’t uncovered?

The Journal’s article deals with private-sector companies, but what about new tech being developed and deployed by the government’s DARPA division that we don’t know about? The New York Times recently reported that a man in China on his cell phone who twice quoted the Shakespeare phrase “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” in conversation found that his phone was instantly turned off when he uttered the word “protest” a second time.

If China and the Middle East are getting their web-filtering software from the U.S., it’s likely that this level of sophistication with cell-phone monitoring also originated somewhere in the U.S. The only thing keeping this level of social monitoring from being turned on U.S. citizens is the good will of our politicians and telecom corporations. What happens if that good will erodes? What if a protest like the one in Madison, WI went national? Would our government have the discipline to refrain from implementing information controls, or would we find ourselves in a censored, restricted nation overnight?