The plan was simple: Give the government of Uzbekistan the ability to monitor everyone’s communications.

I first heard the story about five years ago from an American defense consultant. I had spoken to him over the years about arms sales, particularly those involving the former Soviet Union. He had been involved in overseeing foreign military sales for the American government before he went into the private sector, using his expertise to help broker deals around the world. In 2014, the market in Uzbekistan looked promising.

It was the same year that Human Rights Watch declared that “Uzbekistan’s human rights record remained abysmal across a wide spectrum of violations.” Islam Karimov, the country’s president at the time, reportedly boiled at least one of his enemies alive. The Uzbek government wanted to buy what is known in official parlance as “lawful interception,” and among privacy advocates as surveillance technology. The American company the defense consultant was working for was offering the Uzbeks technology to surveil cellphone and internet communications as well as fixed landlines.

A small team representing the American company went to Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, to meet with officials and tell them what they had to offer. “We don’t want to stop people from using the internet, we want to control it,” the American defense consultant said the Uzbek general in charge of the procurement told one of his colleagues.