Sandvine abandons U.S. marketing of tool for tracking encrypted messages

Odaily Planet Daily News Network monitoring company Sandvine has abandoned plans to sell a controversial Internet surveillance technology that can track encrypted messages to U.S. law enforcement agencies, according to four people familiar with the matter. The company also fired people involved in the plan. most of the employees. It's unclear whether Sandvine has also stopped overseas sales. It is reported that Sandvine is promoting this new product "Digital Witness" to governments and law enforcement agencies in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and North America. The company says the technology can covertly monitor people's internet usage and encrypted messages sent by popular apps like Meta Platform's WhatsApp and Signal. Sandvine had previously offered a trial version of the technology to the United States, but a deteriorating overall economy and ongoing concerns about the company's previous collaboration with authoritarian governments hampered the product's success. Rather than hacking a device or bypassing encryption like spyware infiltrates a phone, Digital Witness analyzes the vast amounts of encrypted traffic traveling through Internet networks, collecting and analyzing the metadata of the communications. Sandvine touts Digital Witness as a "revolutionary solution designed to help investigative agencies extract clues from network data" that can help analyze encrypted traffic, messages, voice calls, contacts, cryptocurrency transactions and information about personal lifestyles. classify and correlate information. (Bloomberg)