A Canadian tech company is under fire because it allegedly assists repressive regimes in clamping down on free speech in cyberspace.
The services of Netsweeper Inc., an Internet content filtering company, are being used in 10 countries with “significant human rights, insecurity, or public policy issues.” This is the claim made by Ronald Deibert, Director of the Citizen Lab, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, supported by the findings in a new report on Netsweeper technologies. These, Citizen Lab alleges, are used in states that “routinely violate human rights in areas of free expression” and “are more likely to abuse filtering technologies to restrict access to political or human rights content.”
The 10 singled out are Afghanistan, Bahrain, India, Kuwait, Pakistan, Qatar, Somalia, Sudan, UAE, and Yemen.
A press release announcing the report alleges that the technology supplied by the Waterloo, Ontario, firm is being used to conduct “widespread filtering of political, religious, and LGBTQ content.”While Internet filtering services have many legitimate uses, like blocking access to pornography in libraries or other public spaces, the problem arises when they are used by large Internet Service Providers that control national-level Internet connectivity in countries facing insecurity, conflict, human rights abuses, or corruption.
