The largest players in the region are two multinational technology companies with offices in Israel: Verint Israel and NICE Systems. Privacy International uncovered that these companies have supplied monitoring centres to Kazakhstan’s KNB and Uzbekistan’s SNB, two security agencies widely implicated in human rights abuses. The monitoring centres allow agencies unchecked access to citizens‘ telephone calls and internet activity on a mass, indiscriminate scale.

The investigation also found that Verint attempted to facilitate Uzbek authorities’ interception of encrypted SSL traffic using fake certificates, based on technology provided by US-based company Netronome, which is owned by Blue Coat. Should Verint have been successful, it would have enabled Uzbek authorities unprecedented access to private communications, and undermined the web‘s most secure form of communication.