Microsoft Training May Have Helped Tunisian Regime To Spy On Citizens 129
An anonymous reader writes "A document released in the recent Cablegate leak reveals that Microsoft provided training to the Tunisian Ministries of Justice and the Interior in exchange for exemption from the country's open software policy. These Ministries would soon put the training to use by phishing for the social networking credentials of bloggers, reporters, political activists and protesters. Microsoft's assistance resulted in the sale of 12,000 software licenses to the Tunisian government."
The cable itself details the effort Microsoft put into negotiating a deal. Their clear intent was simply expanding into a new market, but the author of the cable was skeptical of the Tunisian government's adherence to its stated goals. Quoting: "In theory, increasing GOT law enforcement capability through IT training is positive, but given heavy-handed GOT interference in the internet, Post questions whether this will expand GOT capacity to monitor its own citizens."
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Gates is rich enough. But I'm guessing the local sales rep isn't a billionaire yet.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, all Microsoft knew was giving them computer training. What about we start writing news on how school chemistry classes allow people to make bombs? Or god forbid, cooking tv shows teach you how to use a knife!
Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
Duh. Welcome to capitalism. If there's a buck to be made, a human life becomes secondary.
Oh c'mon, why the outcry? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it gets known now? You don't think MS is the only company that doesn't give half a shit about who they sell to, do you? If there's not an outright embargo (that has to be circumvented somehow), anyone can buy anything if the price is right. Hell, IBM sold computers to the Nazis, knowing quite well just what they will be used for.
You think any corporation would have acted different in any way? Corporations are the pinnacle of capitalist evolution: Intelligence without conscience.
Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)
Gates is rich enough. But I'm guessing the local sales rep isn't a billionaire yet.
No, but that only makes it even worse: That sales rep sold out an entire country's people in exchange for a few grand worth of commissions.
More to the point, somebody hired a sales rep willing to do that. And that willingness stems from a flaw in Microsoft's business model. The quality and price of their products has never matched their market share; they subsist on inertia and lock-in. The problem with that model is that all it would take to break it is for a single medium-sized country to decide that they would rather spend a billion dollars once to implement all of the APIs, file format converters, migration tools, etc. to make switching from Microsoft to FOSS easy and popular in order to avoid having that same country's government and people continue to pay an even greater amount of money every year to a foreign corporation. The last thing in the world they need is for some oil-rich dictators to conclude that they could implement a feature-complete open-source equivalent of Exchange Server for less than the amount of money their country pays to license it.
So when Tunisia or China or whoever else comes to Microsoft and makes demands, Microsoft bends. Because Microsoft can't afford for those countries to make the path away from Microsoft's ecosystem simple, well-documented and conspicuous. So yes, you can blame the sales rep who did the deed, but that doesn't change the fact that Microsoft has left itself in the position that it has to yield to crackpot dictators who violate human rights in order to maintain its market dominance.
USA (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Only Money matters: Bing in China, renren, GOT,... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Which is it? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the training was more along these lines [ycombinator.com] than "Ctrl-X cuts, ctrl-V pastes..."
Re:Microsoft compatibility prohibited? (Score:5, Insightful)