DPI is most advanced and intrusive category of inspection tools, it is able to analyze every single packet of the traffic filtering particular services or contents. Let’s remind that DPI systems are adopted by various regime in the world such as the Iran but also China that adopted the technology to implement its Great Firewall project.
Eric King, head of research at Privacy International, declared:
“No Western democracy has yet implemented a dragnet black-box DPI surveillance system due to the crushing effect it would have on free speech and privacy,”
“DPI allows the state to peer into everyone’s internet traffic and read, copy or even modify e-mails and webpages: We now know that such techniques were deployed in pre-revolutionary Tunisia. It can also compromise critical circumvention tools, tools that help citizens evade authoritarian internet controls in countries like Iran and China.”
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Today several companies sell
DPI technology in Russia such as Canada’s Sandvine, Israel’s Allot, America’s Cisco and Procera, and China’s Huawei, by the last summer all mobile operators in Russia have deployed a DPI:
- Procera was installed in VimpelCom.
- Huawei’s DPI solutions are in use in Megafon.
- MTS bought CISCO DPI technology.
The mobile operators motived the acquisitions of DPI to control the use of bandwidth saturated by improper adoption of peer to peer protocols, the introduction of DPI in this case allow to suppress any undesired services such as torrents.
Not only mobile operators have installed DPIs technologies, every Russian ISP has installed a DPI as required by law at his own expense, minor operators have so searched for cheap solutions found in the used market of CISCO DPIs.