Thomas Fox-Brewster ,
Forbes Staff
I cover crime, privacy and security in digital and physical forms.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan delivers a speech during 27th Mukhtars (local administrators) meeting at the Presidential Complex in Ankara on September 29, 2016. (Photo credit – ADEM ALTAN/AFP/Getty Images)
“I do not wish to spend the rest of my life with the regret of having been a part of Erdoğan’s insanity, so I’m out.” The company-wide email on April 4 from Kriss Andsten, a senior technical engineer for Fremont, California-based Procera Networks, landed with a thud and marked the beginning of an internal revolt that has rattled the telecom technology provider. Andsten went on to explain his grievance: the sale of Procera’s deep packet inspection product for alleged surveillance by a totalitarian regime. “We are … heading down the rabbit hole where we’re not using it for good anymore, in the name of chasing the next buck. A recent request from Turkey… seals the deal for me. The Cliffs Notes version is that we’re selling a solution for extracting usernames and passwords from unencrypted traffic.” After nine years at the company’s offices in Malmo, Sweden, he resigned.
The senior decision-making team at Procera considered the request legitimate, one that came from major operator Turk Telekom through a middleman, Ankara-based networking specialists Sekom, and would ostensibly be used to track fraudsters. It formed part of a lucrative $6 million contract for Procera, whose technology helps telecom operators manage internet traffic. Normally innocuous, deep packet inspection can help uncover malware or route data more efficiently.
But a cadre of angry Swedish engineers who supported Andsten believed they were being asked to turn innocent tech into evil surveillance gear, and hand it to a regime that had become increasingly repressive. “Hell broke loose in Malmo,” said one former employee.
According to a half dozen current and former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, leaked Procera documents and internal communications, Turk Telekom requested not just a feed of subscribers’ usernames and passwords for unencrypted websites, but also their IP addresses, what sites they’d visited and when. “Erdoğan is insane and people could well die from this work,” one former Procera employee told FORBES. Another said: “The installation in Turkey is large-scale surveillance of the population with feeds to one or other governmental agency… If the company leadership thinks this is business we should be doing, they should answer for it publicly.”
Procera declined to discuss specific deals, but a spokesperson provided the following statement by email: “Procera Networks strongly supports core principles of human rights and dignity for people around the world. We provide technology that helps telecom operators run their businesses more efficiently and enhance their customers’ user experience. We do not provide technology for surveillance. We align our business with all applicable laws and globally-recognized standards of operations. Under the new management team established in the last year at Procera, we have continued to strengthen our policies and processes to help ensure that our products are used as intended.” Recommended by Forbes
Founded in 2002, Procera’s headquarters are in Fremont, though large chunks of its development work is done in Canada and Sweden, the latter serving deep packet inspection to Europe and the Middle East. In mid-2015, Francisco Partners, a private equity firm with $10 billion in assets, acquired Procera for $240 million. A new CEO, Lyndon Cantor, was installed at the top to drive Procera through the “next chapter in its strategic development,” according to a company press release, as the executive team was given a refresh. The changes rankled some of Procera’s left-leaning employees. One former employee told FORBES that the acquisition by Francisco Partners led to greater focus on “regulatory compliance… mostly bulk surveillance.” Another claimed: “When Francisco Partners took control it was business ethics that mattered, not human ethics.”