According to Free Press, Boeing-owned company Narus sold Egypt the “Deep Packet Inspection” equipment needed to control protesters’ access to the web and their phones.

(Thank you, Ben!)

Jen Graves (The Stranger’s former arts critic) mostly writes about things you approach with your eyeballs. But she’s also a history nerd interested in anything that needs more talking about, from male...

13 replies on “American Company Sells Internet Blackout Program to Egypt”

  1. And if they didnt sell it, Sandvine would have and there Canadian. Its what Comcast uses for their Deep Packet Inspection hardware, which basically can do the same thing Narus hardware can do.

  4. It’s not blackout software, it’s internet-recording software. They can only record the traffic if the ‘net is up, which it’s not.

    As Steve Bannerman, Narus’ marketing VP once bragged about in an interview with Wired:

    “Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record. We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls.”

    Of course, now the Egyptian government has seemingly shut down the entire internet and all cell phone service in the country. So people aren’t really even able to get online to be tracked by the creepy surveillance technology sold by Narus.

  5. You’ll find Narus (or one of their competitors) installed at every telecom and ISP in the United States.

    I always like these IT stories that aren’t news until people who doesn’t understand technology find out about it.

    Only recently have scary news stories about mysterious internet cookies started to become less common place. I’m guessing packet inspection will make an excellent replacement scary big brother technology story template.

  9. What #1 and #5 said. DPI is common, and isn’t malicious in and of itself, nor is it an “Internet kill switch”.

    Additionally, the fact that they bought it from Narus just tells me that they spent a lot of money on it to buy a big hardened off-the-shelf version. They could have built one themselves, and then this article might decry open-source software…

  11. Yeah, I hate to pigeonhole Jen, but why write this article? Do you understand DPI? Was the headline of your own devising? It’s all wrong and should be corrected. DPI doesn’t allow for blacking out the internet. It’s a blanket term for a device looking into packets not destined for it and then acting on this information.

    For example, a home internet router might look into outgoing packets (which are by definition not destined for it: they are destined for somewhere on the internet) and classify them into categories of level 7 traffic (application-level): VOIP, internet browsing, long-lived internet downloads, mail, bittorrent, etc. It could act on this information by prioritizing certain classes of traffic. This is called QoS and a ton of home routers do it. The classification mechanisms might be more simplistic, but many of the application-layer classifiers could reasonably be labelled DPI.

    Full end-to-end encryption will obscure the packet stream sufficiently to evade most DPI/stateful inspection techniques. So if you’re a dissident, maybe use Tor or something similar (an ssh proxy is probably sufficient if it hasn’t been compromised) to shroud your traffic.

    That said those techniques for obscuring traffic are COMPLETELY BESIDE THE POINT when a whole nation goes dark. Unless every egress point in the nation has a Narus device on it (if so, kudos to the sales guys for the ridiculously large contract) this is not the case. DPI is used for subversive traffic shaping during times of stability, not for a kill switch during unrest.

    Please correct this article.

  12. It’s really the hot tipper Ben who is to blame here rather than the non-existent tech editor at The Stranger. Let’s build a sniffer for his packets so they go to nary a blog in the future.

Comments are closed.