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Sandvine, a network equipment maker acquired by Francisco Partners in a 2017 deal, was added by the US Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security to its Entity List on February 26, 2024, for selling deep packet inspection technology to the Egyptian government, which used it "in mass web-monitoring and censorship to block news as well as target political actors and human rights activists". In 2020 Bloomberg had reported that Sandvine equipment was used in Belarus to block websites during protests over the disputed presidential election, after which Sandvine cancelled its Belarus contract. Francisco Partners told Bloomberg in August 2024 that it no longer owned Sandvine.
Response: In 2020 Sandvine said that "custom code was developed and inserted into Sandvine's products to thwart the free flow of information" in Belarus, called this "a human rights violation" and said it "abhors" the use of technology to suppress information. In September 2024 it announced it would leave 56 non-democratic countries, including Egypt. Access Now reported that Francisco Partners did not respond to its calls to address the Belarus case.
Francisco Partners owned NSO Group, the Israeli maker of the Pegasus spyware sold to governments, from its 2014 acquisition until it sold the company to its founders and Novalpina Capital in February 2019. On November 1, 2018, the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab sent Francisco Partners an open letter on the continued misuse of Pegasus, citing its findings of likely Pegasus infections in 45 countries and its high-confidence assessment that the phone of Saudi activist Omar Abdulaziz, a collaborator of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, had been infected by an operator probably linked to the Saudi government. The letter said an earlier letter of May 29, 2018 remained unanswered.
Response: According to Citizen Lab, Francisco Partners had written on February 20, 2018 that it was "very much willing to engage in a constructive dialogue with Citizen Lab".
The University of Toronto's Citizen Lab reported that deep packet inspection middleboxes on Türk Telekom's network, which it matched to PacketLogic devices made by Sandvine (formerly Procera Networks), were used to redirect users in Turkey and Syria who tried to download legitimate Windows programs to spyware, first FinFisher and then spyware similar to StrongPity, and that similar devices at a Telecom Egypt demarcation point redirected users to affiliate ads and cryptocurrency mining scripts. At the time Sandvine was owned by Francisco Partners, which had combined it with Procera in 2017. The Associated Press reported that some targets may have been affiliated with the Kurdish YPG.
Response: Sandvine called the allegations "technically inaccurate and intentionally misleading", said in a letter to Citizen Lab that PacketLogic "is not capable of any form of payload injection, malicious or not", and said it could not finish its own inquiry without Citizen Lab's full findings. Türk Telekom said it complies with Turkish law and does not redirect users to malicious downloads.
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