Illustration: Ibrahim Rayintakath for Bloomberg
How Selling to a Repressive Regime Almost Broke a Tech Firm
Sandvine built a business offering network management tools that, in the wrong hands, could be used for censorship, until the US government intervened.
In early 2023, Christopher Le Mon began investigating an American-owned tech company, which contacts working on human rights issues said was being used by the Egyptian government to censor media and monitor activists’ online activities.
At the time, the Biden administration was “trying to stem the abuse of technology to violate human rights,” Le Mon, then deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor said, and had put sanctions and trade restrictions on several Israeli spyware companies. This company, Sandvine, was different — the technology it supplied was designed for innocuous purposes, employed by telecommunications companies around the world to manage traffic on their networks. But it could also be used by governments who wanted to restrict access to websites, and keep logs of who was talking to who on the internet.