From a recent report on the public radio program “Marketplace”:
Facebook and Twitter received lots of credit for helping to spread the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia — but Silicon Valley contributions to the Arab Spring are actually much more complicated. Within a half hour’s drive of Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters there are at least a half a dozen other tech firms whose sales in the Middle East facilitate surveillance or censorship. Driving down Highway 101 from Palo Alto you’ll pass the headquarters of McAfee and Palo Alto Networks — both sell technology that’s widely used in the Middle East to censor the net. You’ll pass Polaris — which helps states track their citizens using their cell phones — and if you turn and left and head out to Milpitas you’ll reach SS8. In security circles, SS8 is kind of infamous for designing software to bug BlackBerries.
…..
John Palfrey at Harvard’s Berkman Center [for Internet and Society] is disappointed, but he’s not surprised.John Palfrey: My question to them would be what’s wrong with selling into, say, 170 markets in the world and setting aside 30 markets where you know there might be a problem with how people use these technologies.
