Internet surveillance firm Sandvine says it’s leaving 56 ‘non-democratic’ countries

Sandvine, the makers of surveillance-ware that allowed authoritarian countries to censor the internet and spy on their citizens, announced that it is leaving dozens of “non-democratic” countries as part of a major overhaul of the company. 

The company, which was founded in Canada, published a statement on Thursday, claiming that it now wants to be “a technology solution leader for democracies.” As part of this new strategy, Sandvine said it has already left 32 countries and is in the process of leaving another 24 countries. 

Sandvine did not name the 56 countries, apart from Egypt, where Sandvine promised to leave by the end of March 2025. For the remaining countries — including non-government customers in Egypt — the “end-of-service” date will be the end of 2025. 

This change in the company’s direction comes after years of investigations by Bloomberg, which reported that Sandvine had sold its internet surveillance products to authoritarian regimes, including Belarus, Egypt, Eritrea, the United Arab Emirates, and Uzbekistan.

Sandvine said that it based its decision to withdraw from the dozens of countries on a review of its operations based on The Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2023 Democracy Index, which categorizes countries based on their “regime type.” The company also said it made this decision “in consultation with the U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. Department of State, and other key members of the U.S. government.”

Sandvine did not respond to a request for comment, asking the company to provide a full list of the countries that it has already left, and that it is planning on leaving. 

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Commerce put Sandvine on a blocklist — technically known as the Entity List — accusing the company of selling its products to the Egyptian government, which used Sandvine “in mass web-monitoring and censorship to block news as well as target political actors and human rights activists.”

In the last few years, digital rights research group Citizen Lab published reports about Sandvine, which also exposed the use of the company’s technology in Turkey and Syria, where Sandvine’s equipment was allegedly used to redirect hundreds of users to spyware. 

Sandvine’s overhaul appears to show that the pressure applied by the U.S. government actions against the company was effective, according to experts. 

“For a long time, we knew about the harm but didn’t know what might effectively pump the brakes on out-of-control surveillance tech proliferation,” John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, told TechCrunch. “Sandvine’s tailspin shows that the U.S. model, which includes sanctions, can have a direct positive impact.”

Ron Deibert, the director of Citizen Lab, agreed, telling TechCrunch that the Sandvine case “shows what can happen when you have careful evidence-based research, investigative journalism, and public interest advocacy combined with targeted and meaningful government regulations.” 

In the last couple of years, the U.S. government has targeted other companies that sell surveillance technology. In 2021, the U.S. Commerce Department put NSO Group on the Commerce Department’s blocklist, effectively barring U.S. companies from doing business with the Israeli spyware maker, which sells its mobile spyware Pegasus. In 2023, the U.S. government put Intellexa, a consortium that makes the spyware Predator, on the same economic blocklist.

This year, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned Intellexa’s founder Tal Dilian and one of his business associates. These sanctions, which specifically targeted Dilian, rather than his companies, have caused other spyware makers to worry about getting in the U.S. government’s crosshairs themselves.