The Waterloo, Ont.-based maker of network-monitoring software has given up on selling its Digital Witness product to American law enforcement and laid off people who had been working on it, Bloomberg reported. The company told Bloomberg the layoffs were due to the general state of the global economy. Sandvine has been owned by Francisco Partners, a private equity firm, since 2017. (Bloomberg)

Talking point: Sandvine bills Digital Witness as a response to criminals’ increased use of encryption to shield their digital activities. It can tell authorities who sends encrypted messages to whom, when, using which apps on which protected networks, along with information on internet-enabled devices they use, from phones to cars. Authoritarian governments have used Sandvine’s technologies to censor the internet and enable surveillance and it crops up in reports from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab on tools that repressive regimes use, including to target specific dissidents.