Sofrecom: the French company improving the Syrian Internet surveillance

(This is a translation from French of this article) Sofrecom very proudly celebrated their new contract with the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment in 2009. Even Christine Lagarde, who was at that time a French Minister, moved to Damascus for the celebration. On the Syrian side, the Syrian Prime Minister, Mr. Abdallah Dardari, also took part to the contract signature ceremony.

(This is a translation from French of this article)

Sofrecom very proudly celebrated their new contract with the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment in 2009. Even Christine Lagarde, who was at that time a French Minister, moved to Damascus for the celebration. On the Syrian side, the Syrian Prime Minister, Mr. Abdallah Dardari, also took part to the contract signature ceremony. While it is not a surprise to see a French company specialized in communications helping a foreign operator, one may wonder why our companies target so questionable markets in terms of Human Rights.

The range of products and services of Sofrecom may let us think that they intervened on the "management" of the STE network. Sofrecom develop their activities in Africa, Middle-East, and Asia, and their offices in Dubai recently became the official headquarters for Sofrecom Middle-East. At Reflets, our natural tendancy to be suspicious made us take a closer look to the "Networks and services" activity of Sofrecom while checking the markets that the company targets.

Source: Wikipedia (French). The column on the right indicates "Network and services" activity, which contains: Technological expertise on broadband and backbone networks; NGN, WIMAX, 2G-3G and LTE 4G; Network engineering and RFP; Supervisory control; Deployment; Commissioning; QoS improvement; Exploitation and maintenance.

The business pages from the Sofrecom website provide a lot of information on the...