Waterloo, Ont. tech company blacklisted by U.S. Commerce Department over surveillance, spyware allegations [Video]

A Waterloo, Ont. tech company is in hot water for allegedly providing technology that can be used for mass surveillance and censorship.

U.S. private equity firm Francisco Partners said it’s no longer the owner of troubled technology vendor Sandvine, which was blacklisted by the U.S. Department of Commerce earlier this year for supplying “mass web-monitoring and censorship” software, as reported by Bloomberg.

Sandvine is no stranger to controversy. Over the last several years, they’ve struck deals with autocratic governments, including Egypt, where the company’s technology was allegedly used to inject spyware into the devices of government critics.

What does Sandvine do?

To fully understand what Sandvine is being accused of, it’s important to know what they do – something called deep packet inspections (DPI).

“What does that mean? When you go to a particular website, there may be websites that are blocked. Sometimes they will go to a ‘dot com’ and it redirects to …