Apparent use of Sandvine devices for malicious or dubious ends in two countries | Hacker News Reader

Apparent use of Sandvine devices for malicious or dubious ends in two countries

citizenlab.ca

109 pointspjf21 comments

I wonder what prevents them to order TurkTrust to issue ssl sertificates to do this kind of attack to the secure websites. Turkey recently has gained power to take over companies, if they don't comply with their order (temporary, State-of-emergency law). I think they had issued a certificate to *.google.com before: https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/01/08/the-turktrust-ss...

edit: Ankara was the target. Like this one.

Nothing at all, and CAA doesn't help solve the problem either unfortunately.

Even when it comes to CAs that voluntarily adopted CAA, their implementations have silently failed on occasion. See https://www.net.in.tum.de/fileadmin/bibtex/publications/pape...

An acquaintance of mine that I've known since high school (and apparently we had play dates when we were toddlers) works for Sandvine. Travels often to handle installations.

I had not realized this is what they do, what he was setting up. Kind of sad to hear it. He's no fool, which means he probably fully understands what he's doing. I do wonder how he justifies it to himself.

I've spoken to a few engineers at Sandvine. Both said they knew what their product was being used for. One quit (at least partly) because of it.

I also went to school with a bunch of people who were pretty seriously environmentally-focused (environment faculty programs). Some ended up in the oil and mining industries. When probed about this, the general response boiled down to "I want to find something else but I also want to be employed."

I'm no psychologist but I think it's just kind of part of the human condition that our needs > our wants. Morals are less of a need than employment, maybe? Just spitballing.

> I'm no psychologist but I think it's just kind of part of the human condition that our needs > our wants. Morals are less of a need than employment, maybe? Just spitballing.

Morals are part of the "self actualization" tip of the pyramid in Maslow's hierarchy of needs (and to some extent the middle part, belonging, but that's only if you're likely to be shunned for breaking a moral principle).

So I guess if we accept Maslow's hiararchy of needs, morals would be a need, but less important than the money needed to have shelter, food, water, etc.

I don't want to advocate for nihilism, but most institutions are unethical in some way, or pave the way for evil third parties.

There are exceptions, of course. They just hire less often, pay less, want an specific cultural fit etc.

Myself, I've taken the path of avoiding such businesses – thankfully I'm frugal – but when I imagine the expensive things I could have/do, or when I'm picking cheaper stuff to do with friends and dates, it's hard not to remember the allure of selling out.

Oh I understand fully. I work for Amazon.

...and we've come full circle for WHY the Maker-Hacker movement / Internet / Silicon valley.

Given that morals and ethics are weighed against economic decisions at the personal level. It is our responsibility as self-actualized individuals aware of this, and posseing the skills to do something about it to help create economic conditions to alleviate the dissonance that comes with choice.

As a crust punk friend turned very successful investment banker said to me when asked about their career trajectory "you can do more damage from the inside than the out."

It may be unfair to jump to the conclusion that your acquaintance does this type of work. From how far I've gotten through the report, it seems to more be pointing towards the procera equipment doing this, which is a recent merger with Sandvine late last year.

Also, it's not like Sandvine only sells it's products to Turkey and Egypt for this feature set, it's entirely plausible that this person could work in a market that doesn't have these concerns.

Disclosure: I used to work with Sandvine as a customer in a previous role

They provide generic traffic management and acceleration tools. They can be used to provide this kind of bulk of interception but its not the only (or even most usual?) application

A tool's purpose is what it's used for.

I’ll remember that, the next time someone is murdered with a hammer.

You can hammer nails with a firearm, but I'd hardly call that the most effective tool for the job.

Facebook also aids the Erdogan regime:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/world/europe/facebook-sai...

This shows again that the vast majority of corporations are non-ethical entities and only seek profit. Only when their profits are endangered, e.g. backlash from the general public, do they act "ethically".

Corporations are made up of people. How many people are assisting in exactly this sort of thing? Military servicemembers, bureaucrats, judicial workers, etc? As long as humans are violating ethics, the organizations they create will as well. It's by no means a business-specific feature of society.

Well, not really. But it does show the safety of internet users can be compromised by attacks/inducements against a trivially small number of companies entrusted with critical infrastructure.

I'm not so in the loop anymore regarding helping out dissidents, but what I do remember is that the BGP based censorship in Turkey is executed by the Militairy. Perhaps it's a idea for citizenlab to sue the Turkish state for using it's militairy agains't it's own people. The political price of censorship would rise even if the litigation fails.

According to the map here https://www.sandvine.com/company, very few countries are not a customer.

Hopefully someday we can hold accountable those helping dictator Recep Erdogan to oppress his people as war criminals!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com