Washington, May (ANI): Various terrorist groups, corrupt governments and anti-American forces rely on U.S. technology to repress citizens and conduct terror campaigns, it has emerged.
Jeff Bardin, consultant for security analysis group Treadstone 71, said over 10,000 jihad groups around the world use it to plan strategies and recruit members.
Also, web-filtering technology from Websense is used in Yemen to monitor citizens, while Bahrain, which uses McAfee's SmartFilter product, plans to switch to Palo Alto Networks' software to prevent freedom-seekers from bypassing censorship.
"We are putting virtual weapons out there with the source code, and we make it widely available," Fox News quoted Bardin, as saying.
Californian company Internet Brands that makes the group-discussion service vBulletin said it is aware of the misuse of its products and that its license agreement clearly forbids such activity, yet the company's hands are tied.
"As software providers, vBulletin's capacity to monitor content on the Internet is limited, particularly on websites using illegal, unlicensed copies of vBulletin," a spokesman said.
"vBulletin along with parent company Internet Brands in no way condones terrorist activity and cooperates fully with law enforcement agencies on any investigation it can be of help on," the spokesman added.
According to experts, monitoring can be one solution to prevent abuse by terrorists and repressive regimes. But it presents new issues and could even lead to abuse.
"The solution may be far worse than the existing problem, because dictatorial regimes could use that same monitoring and compliance capability to gain even better control over what users do on their computers," the report quoted John Hemry, a retired Navy office and author, as saying.
"But in the end, the only practical solution may be to try to gain the cooperation of the hacker community to outwit software abuse by totalitarian regimes," Hemry added. (ANI)
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