Jim Armitage: Profiting by helping brutal regimes to snoop

[xchrom]

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/jim-armitage-profiting-by-helping-brutal-regimes-to-snoop-8590819.html


John le Carré’s latest novel is coloured by the great spy writer’s disenchantment with the privatisation of the intelligence world. He should have read the report that has just landed on my desk from Reporters Without Borders.

Usually, these documents are full of harrowing, but important tales of journalists being jailed, beaten up, even killed. But this latest one was troubling in a different way. It tells of the private companies that help regimes such as Bahrain, China, Iran and Syria snoop on the internet activities of their citizens.

I’m not going to profile them all but, this being a British newspaper, I’d like to introduce you to the Gamma Group. Based in Andover, this company sells advanced software to governments and law enforcement agencies that allows them to spy on their citizens’ computers. It’s canny stuff. It can infect an entire internet café to survey everyone there. Or it can be installed in a smartphone or computer through a piece of Trojan software that can then be remotely operated by the government agency.

Gamma’s kit has been repeatedly found in countries where journalists are routinely mistreated, most notably Bahrain, where many journalists have been imprisoned and tortured. Among those targeted by Gamma’s FinFisher Technology was Ala’a Shehabi, a journalist and university lecturer in Bahrain who was sent emails which she found to be suspicious. She forwarded them for technical analysis to experts who detected FinFisher software in it.

[leveymg]

1. KNR for exposure. Privatized surveillance firms and their products need more exposure.

People need to know the world they live in, and have an accurate sense of its dangers.

[kelliekat44]

2. "snoop" as in Homeland Security and the FBI? nt