Civil Liberties

U.S. Tech Popular With Censorship-Happy Regimes

What was that about selling the rope ...?

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Some of the world's most repressive regimes employ U.S.-made surveillance and censorship technology. Citizen Lab Internet research group, based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, discovered that that governments around the world use systems from made by Blue Coat Systems of Sunnyvale, California.

As the New York Times reported, Citizen Lab "determined that Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Republic employed a Blue Coat system that could be used for digital censorship. The group also determined that Bahrain, China, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Nigeria, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey and Venezuela used equipment that could be used for surveillance and tracking."