Blue Coat, Skype and QQ named despots' best friends

Overlords

Information security vendor Blue Coat Systems is slammed for “providing filtering and censorship devices for countries such as Syria and Burma”

...rather than just to upstanding, democratic and free, western nations.

They say "enemies of the internet"

Western Governments say

"Testing ground for the latest monitoring techniques" (well behind closed doors, before re-branding it IMP )

but these despots are just using 'standard API's'

the interception points were mandated in international law, by inter government agreements, with state required backdoors in each and every telecommunications system since the 1990's launch of CALEA and the ETSI equivalents. There are heavy fines for a system NOT having a backdoor, and that's just in the USA.

The repressive states that currently spy & worse on their citizens have in some cases been and continue to be members of the international committees that set these snooping standards!

I know it's all secret(*) so that the public shouldn't know that they're being monitored/analysed - it just emphasises that sometimes "The State" is a threat to its citizens, irrespective of which of the world's States we're talking about.

In some States the risk/threat is very clear and urgent and deadly, if you're saying/thinking/'liking' the wrong thing at the wrong time; in other States - such as the UK - the existing communications analytical & monitoring systems are pervasive enough to make straight journalists very very worried about their ability to do their job, and already self-censor.

This was pointed out at the time of the debut of the EU data retention & interception initiatives when the UK managed to get the Agricultural & Fishing Committee of the Conseil to start the process. Surely in the rush to grab the data of all citizens it was completely weighed-up & found proportionate that the same systems would inevitably be abused by failed states - who simply buy Off The Shelf 'repression devices'?

(*) 'secret' sources include ETSI public portal, early 3GPP documents, SORM discussions in NYT, Guardian, Daily Mail, StateWatch etc etc..