Did This American Tech Help Turkey Spy In Syria?

[upnorth]

In late 2016, Forbes learned of a mini uprising at the Swedish branch of major U.S. networking vendor Procera Networks. Multiple staff members threatened to quit, or did in fact leave, over a sale in Turkey of technology capable of supporting the repressive actions of the state, one where surveillance had intensified after a failed coup led to a crackdown by the Recep Erdogan regime. They were nervous about their new owners too: Francisco Partners, a private equity firm that had invested hundreds of millions in surreptitious smartphone surveillance companies.

If a report released by researchers Friday is anything to go by, the employees' actions could well have been justified. Not only do the findings indicate Procera technology was key in helping direct hundreds of targets to spyware downloads in Turkey, but the American-owned systems were also implicated in assisting surveillance from that country and into war-torn Syria, via Turk Telekom. Procera systems were also used for censorship in Turkey and Egypt, and in the latter country the tech was implemented in a bizarre cryptocurrency mining operation

Procera is nowday Sandvine. Previous reports gives a good image.

“I do not wish to spend the rest of my life with the regret of having been a part of Erdoğan's insanity, so I'm out.” The company-wide email on April 4 from Kriss Andsten, a senior technical engineer for Fremont, California-based Procera Networks, landed with a thud and marked the beginning of an internal revolt that has rattled the telecom technology provider. Andsten went on to explain his grievance: the sale of Procera’s deep packet inspection product for alleged surveillance by a totalitarian regime. “We are ... heading down the rabbit hole where we're not using it for good anymore, in the name of chasing the next buck. A recent request from Turkey... seals the deal for me. The Cliffs Notes version is that we're selling a solution for extracting usernames and passwords from unencrypted traffic.” After nine years at the company’s offices in Malmo, Sweden, he resigned.

The senior decision-making team at Procera considered the request legitimate, one that came from major operator Turk Telekom through a middleman, Ankara-based networking specialists Sekom, and would ostensibly be used to track fraudsters. It formed part of a lucrative $6 million contract for Procera, whose technology helps telecom operators manage internet traffic. Normally innocuous, deep packet inspection can help uncover malware or route data more efficiently.

But a cadre of angry Swedish engineers who supported Andsten believed they were being asked to turn innocent tech into evil surveillance gear, and hand it to a regime that had become increasingly repressive. “Hell broke loose in Malmo,” said one former employee.

According to a half dozen current and former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, leaked Procera documents and internal communications, Turk Telekom requested not just a feed of subscribers’ usernames and passwords for unencrypted websites, but also their IP addresses, what sites they’d visited and when. “Erdoğan is insane and people could well die from this work,” one former Procera employee told FORBES. Another said: “The installation in Turkey is large-scale surveillance of the population with feeds to one or other governmental agency… If the company leadership thinks this is business we should be doing, they should answer for it publicly.”

Source : Is An American Company's Technology Helping Turkey Spy On Its Citizens?

Time for another rebrand?