Days after Libyan rebels took control of Tripoli in August, foreign journalists discovered a sophisticated internet surveillance centre in the city.
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As was later revealed on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, Muammar Qaddafi's regime used technology made by Amesys, a unit of Bull of France, to spy on suspected dissidents' emails and online chat.
In Syria, a US company called Blue Coat has revealed that 13 of its internet filtering servers have been used by the government in Damascus in its campaign to silence political dissidence. Blue Coat said it did not know how the equipment arrived in Syria, as it was officially destined for Iraq.
The cases illustrate the growing spectrum of political risks faced by technology companies as they seek to sell sophisticated internet filtering systems in uncharted markets.
"These technologies are like a knife," says Mubarak Tana, the managing director of Turkey's Inforcept, which specialises in a technology called deep packet inspection (DPI) that can snoop on the contents of personal emails.
"A knife can be used to heal a patient by a surgeon, but in the wrong hands it can be used for killing," he says.
Businesses such as Inforcept say they sell their software in the hope that authorities use it lawfully to intercept communications of those committing crimes such as terrorism.
Governments and telecoms companies are among Inforcept's biggest clients and while these clients may use this technology for lawful interception, they could also use it to spy on citizens.
And the business of selling technology that monitors and intercepts communications is substantial.
Globally, the industry is worth US$5 billion (Dh18.36bn) and is growing fast, according to Jeremy Lucas, who owns Telestrategies, a company that organises an annual conference on the subject in Dubai.
The Intelligence Support Systems (ISS) conference, which is closed to the public, showcases an assortment of commercial off-the-shelf internet and telecommunications interception software.
"Our products are designed to be very low cost, they can be deployed by government and telecoms without having a big support group," he says.
Last year the event attracted 56 companies and had between 500 to 1,000 attendees from the region's governments, law enforcement authorities, military officials and telecommunications companies, says Mr Lucas.
The agenda for next year's event has already been drawn up, with seminars set to include discussions on "understanding the basics of wiretapping", "intelligence gathering from Facebook and Twitter conversations in Arabic", and "exploiting computer and mobile vulnerabilities for electronic surveillance".
The trade fair has drawn criticism from the US.
Alec Ross, a senior adviser for innovation at the US state department, launched an attack on Mr Lucas through his official Twitter account. In response to a report in the UK's The Guardian newspaper citing Mr Lucas as saying the surveillance technology on display at ISS conferences is available to any country in the world, including those seeking to use it to suppress political movements, Mr Ross wrote: "There can be life and death consequences to sales of these products.
"The head of ISS World Surveillance Show should be more thoughtful about the consequences of his beliefs," he added.
Mr Lucas insists it is not his responsibility to monitor where businesses sell their wares or to control governments' policies on the matter.
"The vendors are free to engage, within the laws of their land, with anybody they want to. We have no control over that," he says.
The sale of surveillance technology is generally permissible by law in many countries, although manufacturers in the US must obtain approval to export high-tech interception devices.
Businesses in the US, though, can circumvent these laws by relocating their operations elsewhere.
Ron Deibert, the director of the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto in Canada, says national level laws in the US, Canada and Europe are limited in terms of preventing the sale of surveillance technology.
Implementing global rules on this issue is also a challenge because of huge political differences between countries.
"It's highly unlikely that we'd find enough governments to cling together, because not enough of them agree on the basic issues around what is acceptable when it comes to monitoring citizens, blocking access to information, basic issues around privacy, judicial oversight and so on," says Mr Deibert.
Civil society groups can act to put pressure on companies to stop selling certain technologies to some governments, and international trade sanctions are a more formal means to bar such trade. But some companies have taken a lead.
Websense is a US company that deals in software packages designed to help censor the internet. It has adopted a policy not to sell to repressive governments, such as Syria.
Arab Spring nations are the latest to appear under the spotlight of international attention as China aggressively controls its online space.
In January last year, Google announced Chinese dissidents' Gmail accounts had been hacked. The company further said it was no longer willing to work with authorities to censor search results in the country and, subsequently, Google redirected its mainland website to its Hong Kong domain, which is not bound by the same censorship laws.
Tighter regulation of the internet is also growing in developed countries including Australia, which has proposed internet filtering laws to block inappropriate content such as pornography websites from being accessed inside the country.
"I think generally the trend worldwide is towards greater government intervention into cyberspace, whether it's autocratic, authoritarian or democratic regimes; there definitely is a trend in this direction," says Mr Deibert.
"There are all sorts of ways to make money and many of those ways can actually do harm to people, and I think that these are choices every individual has to make for themselves," he says.
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