The article published by Foreignpolicy.com draws on a speech by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declaring "Internet freedom" to be a touchstone of the US foreign policy and then argues, with evidence, that the most sophisticated gadgets for strangling online free speech and choking dissent around the world are basically made in America.
According to foreignpolicy.com, American corporations are major suppliers of software and hardware to all sorts of governments, including dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa.
It also says the US government remains the biggest customer of American-made surveillance technology, shaping the development of those technologies as well as the business practices and norms for public-private collaboration around them.
The US technologies for Internet censorship strongly propped pre-revolution authoritarian rules in Tunisia and Egypt, and have helped uphold similar reigns in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia while Washington admonishes other non-conforming governments for failing to protect their citizens’ online liberties, it added.
The world's dictators will remain well supplied as long as the US government continues to support the development of a surveillance-technology industry that clearly lacks concern for the human rights and civil liberties implications of its business-- even rewarding secretive and publicly unaccountable behavior by these companies, the article goes on to read.
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