James Bamford, an investigative journalist and author who specializes in writing about electronic surveillance, told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now in 2008 that a company called Narus had supplied AT&T with the surveillance equipment it needed to do wiretapping for the National Security Agency.
Bamford’s remarks seem prescient now in light of the Egyptian government’s recent communications crackdown against protesters—a crackdown likely enabled by Narus technology.
Discussing Narus, which was capitalized and started up in Israel, and Verint, another Israel-connected company that supplied Verizon with surveillance technology, Bamford said, “So, you know, you’ve got companies—these companies have foreign connections with potential ties to foreign intelligence agencies, and you have problems of credibility, problems of honesty and all that. And these companies—through these two companies pass probably 80 percent or more of all U.S. communications at one point or another. And it’s even—gets even worse in the fact that these companies also supply their equipment all around the world to other countries, to countries that don’t have a lot of respect for individual rights—Vietnam, China, Libya, other countries like that. And so these countries use this equipment to filter out dissident communications and people trying to protest the government…”
Egypt and Saudi Arabia have also been customers of Narus, which the press now refers to as an American company because since late last year it has been a subsidiary of Boeing, and because it is headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. Now it seems likely that Narus supplied the technology that enabled the Egyptian government to block 88 percent or more of the country’s Internet networks. Narus has refused comment to other publications, and at press time no one from the company had returned the Advocate’s calls.
Free Press, an organization that advocates for digital rights, has protested loudly about what’s believed to be a case of an American company profiting from dealing with a regime that tried to use the company’s technology to suppress a democratic movement.
“What we [were] seeing in Egypt is a frightening example of how the power of technology can be abused,” said the group’s campaign director, Timothy Karr. “Commercial operators trafficking in deep packet inspection technology to violate Internet users’ privacy is bad enough; in government hands, that same invasion of privacy can quickly lead to stark human rights violations.”
