Bloomberg has released a wonderful series on this very subject, Wired for Repression:

Bloomberg’s series “Wired for Repression” reveals how Western companies provide surveillance systems to authoritarian countries that claim some of the world’s worst human rights records including Iran, Syria, Bahrain and Tunisia. The newest artillery for repressive regimes, the gear allows authorities to intercept their citizens’ e-mails and text messages, monitor Internet activity and locate political targets through cell phone technology. Brandishing transcripts of personal communications and records of whereabouts, officials now routinely use such information to confront, arrest and torture dissidents.

Here’s one striking story:

The intelligence operative sits in a leather club chair, laptop open, one floor below the Hilton Kuala Lumpur’s convention rooms, scanning the airwaves for spies.

In the salons above him, merchants of electronic interception demonstrate their gear to government agents who have descended on the Malaysian capital in early December for the Wiretapper’s Ball, as this surveillance industry trade show is called.

As he tries to detect hacker threats lurking in the wireless networks, the man who helps manage a Southeast Asian country’s Internet security says there’s reason for paranoia. The wares on offer include products that secretly access your Web cam, turn your cell phone into a location-tracking device, recognize your voice, mine your e-mail for anti-government sentiment and listen to supposedly secure Skype calls.

He isn’t alone watching his back at this cyber-arms bazaar, whose real name is ISS World.

For three days, attendees digging into dim sum fret about losing trade secrets to hackers, or falling prey to phone interception by rival spies. They also get a tiny taste of what they’ve unleashed on the outside world, where their products have become weapons in the hands of regimes that use the gear to track and torture dissidents.

“I’m concerned about my calls or Internet being monitored, because that’s what they sell,” says Meling Mudin, 35, a Kuala Lumpur-based information-technology security consultant who takes defensive measures as he roams the exhibits. “When I make phone calls, I step out of the hotel, I don’t use my computer and I also don’t use the wireless services provided.”

ISS, which convenes every few months in cities from Dubai to Brasilia, is the hub of the surveillance trade. In recent years, countries such as Syria, Iran and Tunisia bulked up their monitoring by turning to some of ISS’s corporate sponsors, such as Italy’s Area SpA and Germany’sUtimaco Safeware AG (USA) and Trovicor GmbH, a Bloomberg Newsinvestigation showed.

Business is booming, with annual revenue of $3 billion to $5 billion growing as much as 20 percent a year, ISS organizer Jerry Lucas estimates.

“The demise of repressive governments in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere during this year’s “Arab spring,” she says, stemmed in part from Bush’s “freedom agenda,” which promoted democracy in the Middle East. “The change in the conversation about the Middle East, where people now routinely talk about democratization is something that I’m very grateful for and I think we had a role in that. It would be a mistake to make the leap of faith that this [Arab Spring] would somehow have worked in Iraq,” she says in her first newspaper interview about her memoir, No Higher Honor. [...]

“Gadhafi … wasn’t Saddam Hussein in terms of his reach and capacity,” she says. “I do think that an Arab spring in Iraq would have been unthinkable under Saddam Hussein.

The new president of the Tunisian Internet Agency (ATI), Moez Chakchouk, told participants at the Arab Bloggers Meeting [in Tunisia] today that western companies offered significant discounts on use of censorship software to the Tunisian government in exchange for testing and bug-tracking. He said confidentiality contracts preclude him from naming the companies, but said the Internet Agency has extracted itself from these partnerships and thus can no longer afford to censor, even if they wished to (he says they don’t anymore).

Thanks to the change in leadership of the government agency previously charged with censorship and surveillance, Chakchouk is now encouraging bloggers and activists to push for better regulation and constitutional protections for online free speech.

I’m involved in the following event on 2 October at 6pm:

In Egypt and Tunisia we have seen ordinary people come together to claim democracy and human rights in the face of oppressive regimes, with Twitter and Facebook the other heroes of the revolution. Are social media and Al Jazeera instrumental in what happened, or are they just the latest communication tools? Can anyone with a mobile phone foment revolution or do the punitive regimes in Syria, Bahrain and Libya show that it takes a whole lot more?

Join our panel: Mona Eltahawy, columnist; Simon Sheikh, international public speaker and national director of the community advocacy group GetUp!; and Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International.

Salil Shetty appears with the support of Amnesty International.

Chaired by Antony Loewenstein;

We may speak about this, this, this, this or this.

The State Department has opened a brand-new office to manage U.S. policy toward countries attempting democratic transitions in the Middle East.

William Taylor, senior vice president for conflict management at the U.S. Institute of Peace, has moved over to Foggy Bottom to lead the new office, called the Middle East Transitions office, which began operations this week. His deputy is Tamara Cofman Wittes, who is now dual hatted, also continuing on deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs. Taylor’s chief of staff is Karen Volker, who is leaving her job as director of the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) to join the new office. MEPI also falls under Wittes’ portfolio. Taylor reports up to Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns and Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman.

In a Monday interview with The Cable, Taylor said his office will begin by leading State Department coordination on policy toward Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, the three Middle East countries that are trying to make the shift from dictatorship to democracy.

“The idea is we want to focus energy and policy attention on how we support these three transition countries,” he said. “The idea is to be sure this gets top-level attention in the department.”

Taylor’s office will have about 10 to 12 people, and he said he hopes to soon add a resident senior advisor from both USAID and the Pentagon. The office is meant to be permanent, and would expand its operations to cover countries like Syria and Yemen — if and when those countries attempt a democratic transition.

Taylor’s first job will be to lead an effort to develop support strategies for Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia. Then, his office will go about trying to implement those strategies by working within State, around the interagency process, and then with international financial institutions, non-governmental organizations, and stakeholders on the ground. Taylor said he will attend National Security Council meetings on issues related to his brief.

In President Barack Obama’s May 19 speech on the Middle East, he promised to work on establishing enterprise funds for Egypt and Tunisia, which are accounts meant to support start up programs and activities abroad, and said that U.S. support for democracy will “be based on ensuring financial stability; promoting reform; and integrating competitive markets with each other and the global economy — starting with Tunisia and Egypt.”

Taylor said that the administration was still eager to pursue enterprise funds for these countries, but that legislation would be needed to get it done.

The 9/11 attacks had barely happened and the smouldering wreckage in New York and Washington was still shocking America and the world.

Israel already saw an opportunity. Then former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was asked to express his feelings about the terrorist action in the immediate aftermath.

“It’s very good,” he said. He quickly added: ”Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.”

He argued that the attack would “strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive haemorrhaging of terror.”

In 2008 the Likud leader hadn’t changed his views. He told an audience at Bar Ilan University that 9/11 remained a positive for Israel.

“We are benefiting from one thing, and that is the attack on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, and the American struggle in Iraq,” Netanyahu said. The events had “swung American public opinion in our favour”.

Israel’s ambassador to America, Michael Oren, continued this deluded thinking last week.

The logic was clear; as long as Washington could be convinced (or hoodwinked) that Israel was fighting the same battle, Zionist expansion in the occupied, Palestinian territories and constant intransigence in the region would be rewarded by American largesse.

This symbiotic relationship has led both nations to share similar foreign policy goals but the results have been disastrous; America and Israel have contributed to a decade of unprecedented decline and imperial overreach, despite some wishful thinking within academia.

Not that such views are ever heard in the American Congress or Australian Parliament; our politicians are obsessed with displaying loyalty to Zionism at every conceivable opportunity. By their actions, they are killing any chance of Israel surviving as a Jewish state into the future without expanding apartheid against the Palestinians.

Witness the increased isolation of Israel in the Middle East, with traditional allies Turkey and Egypt turning away from the Zionist state’s arrogance. It is a welcome realignment. America’s ability to shield Israel from the consequences of its actions has diminished. Israel faces, in the words of Israeli editor of Haaretz Aluf Benn, a “political tsunami“.

Not that this has stopped Israeli leaders praising the deep and expanding backing offered by the Obama administration towards Israel. Defence minister Ehud Barak recently told Fox News that, “I can hardly remember a better period of support, American support and cooperation and similar strategic understanding of events around us than what we have right now”.

Although many American Jewish voters are reportedly concerned with the occasional criticisms uttered by Obama against the Zionist colonies in the West Bank (comments almost immediately retracted once Israel rejects the pressure), the US president has essentially followed the script written by previous American leaders; Israel is a nation that must be endlessly indulged.

There are a host of examples of this backing but a WikiLeaks cable confirms that the US actively assisted Egypt and Israel in its brutal siege of the Gaza Strip in the last years. One and a half million people in the Gaza Strip are being punished for daring to elect Hamas in the 2006 elections. This collective punishment is illegal under international law.

The catastrophe of the Israeli and American relationship over the last decade has been its wilful inability to engender any respect for its actions. Military might has actually caused wholesome rejection of decades of established order. There is a collective crisis of confidence despite overwhelming military might. Israel has never been better armed and protected by its super-power boss and yet almost daily in the Israeli press one reads paranoia about the country’s current direction. Even the massive recent Israeli tent protests largely chose to ignore the Palestinians. Clearly a desire for social justice only goes so far.

Despite this, however – and the sentiment is blindly repeated in the Zionist Diaspora, including Australia – there’s little awareness of why Zionism is on the ropes. Nobody dares mention the West Bank occupation – with houses rapidly expanding at twice the rate inside Israel proper – or how to be welcomed into the civilised group of nations without bullying friends into support.

The Middle East after the Arab Spring has changed but perhaps nobody sent the memo to the Israeli political elite.

September 11 offered a seductive narrative that allowed Israel and its backers to hitch a ride on the escalating war machine unleashed by America in the vein hope that the world would finally understand its own “war against terror”. The opposite has occurred, with the strongest and most publicly proud backers of Israeli wars today the global, fascist Right.

Revealingly, such adulation is welcomed in many circles within Israel itself. Orthodox Jewish Knesset member Nissim Zeev told Newsweek in February: “At the end of the day, what’s important is their [the fascists] attitude – the fact they really love Israel.”

We are now seeing this fused nexus between the far Right and Zionist supporters in Australia, backing the Israeli-owned chocolate shop Max Brenner, accusing the backers of Palestinian rights of Nazism. This is coming from individuals and groups that loathe Muslims and love Israel for its racially discriminatory policies towards Arabs.

Shamefully some Greens MPs, such as Jeremy Buckingham in New South Wales and leader Bob Brown, are unwilling to wholeheartedly support Palestinians. Instead, they befriend those who abuse them.

Boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) is a worldwide campaign that deserves support – the effectiveness of such moves are apparent when the Murdoch press, Labor and Liberal parties, Zionist heads and union leaders continually and offensively accuse backers of anti-Semitism – and yet only NSW Greens MP Lee Rhiannon bravely endorses the non-violent movement without shame.

Unlike many other Greens in the public arena, she recognises that it isn’t enough to simply mouth platitudes about human rights; action is required that may well upset the Zionist lobby and conservative media. Bob Brown should understand this, as one of the legacies of 9/11 is the importance of giving voice to those victims suffering under our repression. Palestinians are the perfect candidates.

While most of the corporate media prefers to ignore the ramifications of blindly backing every military misadventure by America and Israel – Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian last weekend comically referred to Western “values” being secure 10 years after 9/11, preferring to forget the millions of dead Muslims caused by unquestioning neo-conservatism – the Arab world doesn’t forget. Perpetual war remains the default setting of Washington, rightly damned by Tariq Ali as reaching its climax with the cheering execution of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

Non-accountable executive power is unquestioned by many in the years since 9/11 and even challenging its validity invites verbal and physical threats.

I should know, having been at the receiving end of this bile for daring to ask why “they” really hate us (it’s not about our supposed Western freedoms) as well as refusing to believe that Israel is at the forefront of this “war on terror” and must be supported.

In reality, Zionist actions have made us Jews less safe than one decade ago.

In Palestine itself, the effect of the 9/11 attacks have been undeniably grim. Amira Hass, a journalist from the Israeli paper Haaretz, reflected on this week’s anniversary:

“My routine reporting laboured to remind the Israeli readers about our repressive military domination, and make visible the spiralling number of Palestinian civilian casualties, killed by the Israeli army. A doomed attempt. The Israeli vocabulary had space for Israeli pain and bereavement only. It made no causal link between supremacy and revolt, repression and revenge.”

Her despairing words ring true today. Too many Jews remain incapable of acknowledging the disastrous legacy of our religion being hijacked by fundamentalist Zionists who craved the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, endless occupation of Palestine, drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan and never-ceasing threats against Iran.

The Jewish community has neither rejected destructive neo-conservatism from its ranks nor acknowledged that supposed protection of Israel was a stated reason for causing chaos in the Middle East and the 9/11 attacks.

Furthermore, Israeli public opinion has moved far rightward in the last decade, adopted and defended anti-Arab and anti-democratic legislation and justified brutal tactics against Palestinians in the West Bank.

The US and Australia support this apartheid in Palestine because their actions contribute to an atmosphere of unquestioning Zionist love.

A viable two-state solution is long dead and buried with the upcoming UN vote on Palestine mere window-dressing and desperation from a Western-funded and corrupt Palestinian Authority wanting to appear relevant.

This is our legacy and this is our responsibility.

When the American government, followed by dutiful Western allies such as Australia, crush any chance of Palestinian self-determination, we shouldn’t be surprised that faith in Obama and Israel is rock bottom.

Working against Western exceptionalism and not excusing criminal behaviour of our supposed friends and allies is a great challenge of our age. If 9/11 taught us anything, it is that state terror always dwarves the actions of a committed bunch of extremists.

The victims know this well.

Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist currently working on a book about disaster capitalism

So, Cablegate as a whole caused these elites that prop each other up into region within the Arab speaking countries, and, within, between Europe and these countries and between the United States and these countries, to have to deal with their own political crises, and not spend time giving intelligence briefings on activists, or sending in, um, the SAS, or other support, and activists within Tunisia saw this, very quickly, I think they started to see an opportunity, and that information, uh, our site, a number of Wikileaks sites, were then immedietly, um, banned by the Tunisian government, Al Akbar was banned by the Tunisian government, a hacker attack was launched on Al Akbar, many had been launched at us but we had come to defend against them. Al Akbar was taken down, their whole newspaper was redirected to a Saudi sex site, believe it or not, there is such a thing as a Saudi sex site, and they rested it back through involvement to the foreign, the foreign ministry back in Lebanon, and then, what I believe to be state-based computer hackers, cause of the degree, the sophistication of the attack, came in and wiped out all of Al Akbar’s cable publishing efforts.

On the same day President Obama pressed again for peace in the Middle East, the Associated Press reminded us that the United States cannot help itself from flooding the region with the instruments of war, reporting that the nation is “quietly expanding defense ties on a vast scale’’ with Saudi Arabia.

How vast? The part that has been highly publicized is the new $60 billion arms sale made to the Saudis because of the ongoing threat of Iran. The deal sends Saudi Arabia 84 new F-15s and upgrades to 70 F-15s. It also sends them about 180 Apache, Black Hawk, and Little Bird helicopters, as well as anti-ship and anti-radar missiles. In officially announcing the sale last fall, Andrew Shapiro, the US assistant secretary of state for political affairs, said the sales were part of “deepening our security relationship with a key partner with whom we’ve enjoyed a solid security relationship for nearly 70 years.’’

But there are other emerging aspects of the security relationship the Obama administration is not so candid about. The AP also reported on an obscure project to create a special elite security force that would fall under the US Central Command. The force would have up to 35,000 members “to protect the kingdom’s oil riches and future nuclear sites.’’ It would be separate from Saudi Arabia’s military and its national guard and would involve tens of billions of dollars in additional military contracts. But no official of the Pentagon, the State Department, or the Saudi embassy would go on the record to discuss the program.

The sheepishness of the Pentagon was mirrored by Obama’s failure to mention Saudi Arabia once in his speech Thursday at the State Department. Obama urged fresh Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, praised the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, harshly denounced Libya and Syria, and cajoled Yemen and Bahrain to loosen up on their people. Obama criticized in general the “corruption of elites’’ and pushed for women’s rights in health, business, and politics. He said, “the region will never reach its full potential when more than half of its population is prevented from achieving their full potential.’’