Proposed US Legislation to Ban US Companies from Selling Surveillance Tech to “Repressive Regimes”

Last December, the Global Online Freedom Act of 2011 (GOFA) was introduced to the House of Representatives. This bill would prohibit the sale of surveillance hardware and software from U.S.-based companies to “repressive regimes” and would require a license if the buyer was any government.

The measure itself appears to lie in stark contrast to the growing assortment of proposed legislation the world over geared towards censoring, blocking, and tracking digital information on the grounds of cybersecurity and copyright. In the light of many uprisings and dissenters in the Middle East and China whose digital component are tightly monitored­—and in some cases blacked out completely—the sponsor of the bill, Scott Brown (R) argues that since a lot of the technology used to squelch uprising and free speech was sold by American companies, this risks American businesses losing the confidence of “Internet users in the United States and in foreign countries.”

However, it is important to note that this bill pointedly excludes Western countries in its definition of repressive regimes. It does not prohibit the sale of such technology to the United States’ own government, nor of the governments those not deemed “repressive,” even though members of those government continue to attempt to push through aforementioned bills, like SOPA, ACTA, and more recently CISPA. While this bill, at first look, seems to be a step in the right direction, it also displays how misunderstood information technology is at a governmental level, and how blind legislators are to their own misuse of cybersecurity technology.

Read more about this bill at BusinessWeek and RT.com. Also, check out this report on Global Voices for a roundup of the status of information freedom worldwide.