Network equipment manufacturer Sandvine Inc. from the United States sold to the Belarusian authorities equipment that allows filtering up to 40% of incoming and outgoing Internet traffic from the country. This is evidenced by the recording of a conversation between the company's management and employees, Bloomberg reported.
Sandvine's management held a conference call to reassure employees worried about the potential impact of the company's cooperation with Belarus. Sandvine's technical director Alexander Haväng, in particular, mentioned that the company had been cooperating with a Belarusian government organization for a year. He also acknowledged that the authorities could have used the company's equipment to block websites and instant messengers during the protests in Belarus, however, according to Haväng, restricting access to specific materials on Internet sites has nothing to do with human rights violations.
"We do not want to play the world's police. We believe that every sovereign state should have the right to establish its own policy regarding what is allowed or prohibited in it," he said.
The contractor through which the Americans supplied their equipment to Belarus was the Russian company Jet Infosystems, which at the beginning of 2019 entered into a deal with Belarus for $ 2.5 million.
