Narus, Israeli-founded and now Boeing-owned, rears its ugly head in Egypt

aha... and why are we not surprised...?

timothy karr via the huffpost on narus...

Telecom Egypt, the nation's dominant phone and Internet service provider, is a state-run enterprise, which made it easy on Friday morning for authorities to pull the plug and plunge much of the nation into digital darkness.

Moreover, Egypt also has the ability to spy on Internet and cell phone users, by opening their communication packets and reading their contents. Iran used similar methods during the 2009 unrest to track, imprison and in some cases, "disappear" truckloads of cyber-dissidents.

The companies that profit from sales of this technology need to be held to a higher standard. One in particular is an American firm, Narus of Sunnyvale, Calif., which has sold Telecom Egypt "real-time traffic intelligence" equipment.

Narus, now owned by Boeing, was founded in 1997 by Israeli security experts to create and sell mass surveillance systems for governments and large corporate clients.

The company is best known for creating NarusInsight, a supercomputer system which is allegedly used by the National Security Agency and other entities to perform mass surveillance and monitoring of public and corporate Internet communications in real time.

Narus provides Egypt Telecom with Deep Packet Inspection equipment (DPI), a content-filtering technology that allows network managers to inspect, track and target content from users of the Internet and mobile phones, as it passes through routers on the information superhighway.

Other Narus global customers include the national telecommunications authorities in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia -- two countries that regularly register alongside Egypt near the bottom of Human Rights Watch's world report.

i started posting on narus in 2007 (see my posts here)... it's one of the companies to be most feared in domestic surveillance and, now that it's owned by boeing, means that its power has increased exponentially...

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Is the U.S. complicit in Iran civil aviation disasters?

another sad state of affairs exacerbated by the foreign policy of the hegemon...

An IranAir passenger jet carrying around 100 people crashed as it was making an emergency landing Sunday in a snowstorm in the country's northwest and broke into several pieces, killing 70 of those on board, Iranian media reported. The others survived with light injuries.

[...]

Iran has a history of frequent air accidents blamed on its aging aircraft and poor maintenance. IranAir's fleet includes Boeing and Airbus aircraft, many of them bought before the country's 1979 Islamic Revolution, which led to a cutoff in ties between the two nations.

Iranian airlines, including those run by the state, are chronically strapped for cash, and maintenance has suffered, experts say. U.S. sanctions prevent Iran from updating its 30-year-old American aircraft and make it difficult to get European spare parts or planes as well. The country has come to rely on Russian aircraft, many of them Soviet-era planes that are harder to get parts for since the Soviet Union's fall.

i posted on this topic back in july 2009 along with a timeline of iran air crashes... you can bet that you won't hear any outcry in the u.s. about the continuing loss of life that is at least indirectly connected to sanctions on iran...

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The airlines and their internet service can go directly to hell

after being nickeled and dimed to death by charges on even the smallest services, the airlines now want to hit us up to pay for wireless internet services on flights... boeing did this a few years ago with lufthansa as its first (and only, as it turned out) customer, and boeing ended up dropping the service over a year ago (see below)... i used it myself on lufthansa transatlantic flights and my principle complaints were, 1) too expensive, and 2) no surprise to anyone, it's almost impossible to work on your computer with the space available on a seat-back tray table, and, when the passenger in front of you reclines their seat, it's absolutely impossible because your screen is pushed into such an angle that you can't even see it...

US airlines, racing to bring the Internet to domestic skies, hope that it will generate not only buzz but revenues.

"If they can charge for it they will. They're looking at every revenue source they can," Terry Trippler, travel expert at TripplerTravel, said on Thursday.

American Airlines says it will be the first major US carrier to feature in-flight Internet access.

The No. 1 US carrier said it will test AirCell's broadband Internet service next year on 15 planes that usually fly transcontinental routes. AirCell Chief Executive Jack Blumenstein said the company can offer Internet access for about USD$10 per user.

"This is rapidly going to proliferate across all commercial aviation," he said.

The airline industry, battered by low-fare competition and rising costs, has derived some stability from a strategy that unbundles products and services that once were included in the price of a ticket.

[...]

Boeing last year was forced to abandoned its Internet foray dubbed Connexion because it failed to attract enough customers.

Trippler said the interest in Internet access is part of a plan for airlines to collect fees anywhere they can and to offer services that spur customer loyalty.

i say, screw 'em...

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Does claiming state secrets in the Jeppesen extraordinary rendition suit mean acknowledging it happened?

just askin'...

U.S. asks court to dismiss lawsuit on secret flights

The U.S. government asked a federal court late on Friday to dismiss a lawsuit against a unit of Boeing Co that charges the firm helped fly suspects abroad to secret prisons.

"Allowing plaintiffs' claims to proceed would risk the disclosure of highly classified information concerning the alleged 'intelligence activities, sources, and methods' of the CIA," said the filing, signed by Acting Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Bucholtz.

The American Civil Liberties Union first filed a complaint in May accusing Jeppesen Dataplan Inc of providing flight and logistical support to at least 15 aircraft on 70 "extraordinary-rendition" flights.

The complaint to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleged Jeppesen "falsified flight plans to European air traffic control authorities to avoid public scrutiny of CIA flights."

The ACLU filed the suit on behalf of five men who say the CIA had them flown to foreign prisons for interrogations and torture.

a little bit about jeppesen dataplan inc...

Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. describes itself this way:

"For more than 70 years Jeppesen has made it possible for pilots and their passengers to safely and efficiently reach their destinations. Today this pioneering spirit continues as Jeppesen delivers information and technology-based information management tool sets essential to navigation and efficient operations management to air, sea and rail operators around the globe. Jeppesen is a subsidiary of Boeing Commercial Aviation Services, a unit of Boeing Commercial Airplanes."

[...]

According to investigative journalist Claudio Gatti, Jeppesen was also involved in planning the flights used in the kidnapping of Khaled El-Masri:

"El-Masri says he was seized while on vacation in Macedonia and flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan, where he was imprisoned, interrogated and tortured for five months before being released without charges. Gatti says El-Masri was rendered in the same Jeppesen-serviced plane as ACLU plaintiff Binyam Mohamed."

for all your extraordinary rendition needs...

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