The Dubai ports deal has done the improbable: it has made CFIUS a household word. This has been a busy year for the secretive Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States. Although the Dubai deal may have outed the committee, CFIUS had already made news in Deal-land earlier last month when it was announced the Check Point Software Technologies Ltd./Sourcefire Inc. deal had entered into a 45-day review period, the same stage as the embattled ports deal is now in.
Check Point is a publicly traded Israeli company; Sourcefire is a privately held American developer of network security products based in Columbia, Md., whose customers include U.S. defense and intelligence agencies. Until recently, CFIUS had investigated only 25 of the 1,600 cases it examined, according to the Treasury
Department. In the end, only one of those deals was nullified, by the elder George Bush in 1990.
CFIUS does most of its work clandestinely, so it was difficult to know what specifically triggered the 45-day review process for Check Point, a business based within the borders of one of our strongest allies. The Baltimore Sun shed some light on the details this week. The FBI was the agency that opposed Sourcefire's $225 million sale to Check Point
because the
agency fears that would give away the keys to the government's most sensitive
computer networks, according to a government source quoted in the paper.
The piece added, "The concerns over Sourcefire's sale appear to be more about the technology rather than the location of the buyer's headquarters, though Israel and the United States have been at odds over Israeli defense technology sales and U.S. fears of Israeli spying."
Sourcefire runs an intrusion-prevention system called Snort and also sells network discovery and remediation software that works with Snort to improve anti-hacking efforts. About 10 percent of Sourcefire's revenue comes from the federal government,
nearly half of which is from classified installations. — Tom Groppe
CFIUS: bad news for Sourcefire? (TheDeal.com, Feb. 17, 2006)
Israel, Md. ties called secure (Baltimore Sun)
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