Tech investment firm Francisco Partners appears to put profits ahead of ethics

Don Bowman, co-founder of Sandvine, was always aware of the risks his company’s products posed. Sandvine makes what is called deep packet inspection equipment, tools useful for spam filtering and internet network management that can also be used for surveillance and censorship.

During Bowman’s two-decade tenure, Sandvine periodically turned down potential clients, including a telecommunications com­­pany partially owned by the Turkish government that wanted Sandvine to help it spy on email corres­pondence. “What that could lead to – we’re talking about journalists vanishing, whistle-blowers put in jail,” says Bowman, who has since founded a security company called Agilicus in Ontario, Canada. “We didn’t want to be part of that.”

Such concerns did not appear to take priority after Francisco Partners Management, a private equity firm in San Francisco, in the United States, that primarily invests in technology companies, bought Sandvine in 2017. Francisco Partners replaced Sandvine’s entire executive team, including Bowman, and Sandvine then began selling to governments with troubling records on human rights, according to interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with the matter and documents reviewed by Bloomberg News. Sandvine had previously dealt exclusively with the private sector, and its pursuit of government contracts, Bowman says, represented “a fundamental shift for the company”.

Sandvine does not make its client list public and declined to comment for this story. But according to documents reviewed from 2018 to 2020, the company agreed to deals worth more than US$100 million with governments in countries including Algeria, Belarus, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Iraq, Kenya, Kuwait, Pakistan, the Philippines, Qatar, Singapore, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Uzbekistan. In its rankings of political freedom, the human rights group Freedom House classified all these countries as either partly free or not free. Eritrea rated 206th out of 210 countries the group examined, worse even than North Korea.

Other companies affiliated with Francisco Partners have faced controversy over deals they have pursued with authoritarian regimes. These include internet-monitoring companies Blue Coat Systems and Procera Networks as well as NSO Group Technologies, which makes software to hack into phones and computers, according to reports from human rights groups such as Amnesty International, Access Now and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which tracks illegal hacking and surveillance.