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CNN
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A senior White House official asked U.S. technology company Cloudflare to help with Internet censorship in Iran last September, but U.S. sanctions prevented the company from doing so, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said Thursday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. .
“A senior official in the White House called me and said, ‘Can you do in Iran what you’re doing in Russia?'” said Prince, whose company makes software that protects users from cyberattacks and authorizes activists in authoritarian regimes. To bypass censorship on a forum dedicated to security and technology. “And I said, ‘No.’ And [they] why not? I said, ‘It’s because the sanctions prevented us from putting the weapon in Iran.’
Last fall, when hundreds of protesters were killed in clashes with Iranian security forces, the Iranian government moved to shut down Internet access.
The report highlights the significant role that big tech companies can play in US foreign policy.
U.S. officials, for example, tried to strike a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to provide critical satellite communications to the Ukrainian military during the war, and were able to encourage SpaceX to provide satellite services to Iran.
As for San Francisco-based Cloudflare, Prince said a White House official suggested the company might be “licensed” to operate in Iran, but Prince replied that it was “too late.”
Prince did not name the White House official.
CNN has requested comment from the White House National Security Council.
The Biden administration has given certain Iranians to technology companies that provide communication tools, such as cloud computing or social media services, in response to US sanctions on Iran in September.
But that move was too late, digital rights activists previously told CNN, and U.S. sanctions inadvertently accelerated the construction of Iran’s internal communications network.
Despite U.S. sanctions being imposed after it invaded Ukraine in February, Prince Cloudflare’s early presence on Russian soil means people there can use Cloudflare’s technology to bypass Moscow’s censorship and read credible news about the war. About 10% of Russian households use Cloudflare’s anti-censorship technology, Prince said.
The calls from the White House show the difficult “trade-off” between sanctions to punish governments for human rights abuses and the need to put technology into the hands of the opposition, he said.
FBI Director Christopher Wray, who was asked to respond to Prince’s comments during the panel discussion, said, “We engage in those commercial activities every day.
Many technologies “offer great opportunities, but great risks in the wrong hands,” Wei said.
While Cloudflare has a track record of protecting dissidents abroad, the company has also drawn criticism from human rights activists for its willingness to provide services to controversial platforms such as message board 8chan.
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