Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni directed intelligence and police officials to use a powerful, invasive malware to spy on domestic political opponents – including parliamentarians, activists and media houses – following the 2011 presidential election, during a period of urban unrest and police
According to Snowden documents analysed by Privacy International, the Australian Signals Directorate had access to and used PRISM, a secret US National Security Agency program which provides access to user data held by Google, Facebook and Microsoft. This is the third spy agency of the 'Five Eyes'
Over a dozen international companies are supplying powerful communications surveillance technology in Colombia. Privacy International examines the actors across the world involved in facilitating state surveillance. The report is available in English and Spanish.
For nearly two decades, the Colombian government has been expanding its capacity to spy on the private communications of its citizens. Privacy International's investigation reveals the state of Colombia's overlapping, unchecked systems of surveillance, including mass surveillance, that are
The Pakistani government has significantly expanded its communication interception activities. This Privacy International report covers the intelligence services plan to capture all IP-traffic in Pakistan and other initiatives, pointing to gaps in the laws governing surveillance.
On July 6th, the company Hacking Team was hacked: over 400GB of administrative documents, source code and emails are now available for download. Documents from the hack confirm once again the claims made in our report Their Eyes on Me, the Moroccan intelligence services made use of Hacking Team's
A 400 gigabyte trove of internal documents belonging to surveillance company Hacking Team has been released online. Hacking team sells intrusive hacking tools that have allegedly been used by some of the most repressive regimes in the world. The documents reportedly confirm Hacking Team has
“Private Interests: Monitoring Central Asia” is a 96-page report detailing its findings from an extensive investigation into electronic surveillance technologies in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. The report brings together the findings of PI's team of investigative
The following piece by Privacy International Legal Officer Adriana Edmeades appeared in openDemocracy: In 2012, Citizen Lab, a think-tank operating out of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, came across evidence suggesting that Gamma International, a multinational
A sizeable political controversy has engulfed President Goodluck Jonathan’s Government in Nigeria, where details surrounding its plans for the total surveillance of Africa’s most populous country continue to emerge. Thanks to pervasive snooping technology readily found and developed in the US, UK
Privacy International in October 2014 made a criminal complaint to the National Cyber Crime Unit of the National Crime Agency, urging the immediate investigation of the unlawful surveillance of three Bahraini activists living in the UK by Bahraini authorities using the intrusive malware FinFisher
Jaafar Al Hasabi, Mohammed Moosa Abd-Ali Ali, and Saeed Al-Shehabi each fled Bahrain for the United Kingdom with one goal: to be safe. These men, activists in the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain, were variously subject to torture, arbitrary detention, harassment, and psychological trauma in their
The publishing of materials from a support server belonging to surveillance-industry giant Gamma International has provided a trove of information for technologists, security researchers and activists. This has given the world a direct insight into a tight-knit industry, which demands secrecy for
After two years of pressing the Government to come clean on what, if anything, they are doing to investigate the potentially illegal export of the spyware FinFisher, a ruling today by the Administrative Court in Privacy International’s favour marks a significant turning point in our long-running
In a damning judgment today the Administrative Court declared that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) acted unlawfully and “irrationally” in issuing blanket refusals into the status of any investigation into the potentially illegal export of the spyware FinFisher to repressive regimes by UK
World leaders must commit to keeping invasive surveillance systems and technologies out of the hands of dictators and oppressive regimes, said a new global coalition of human rights organizations as it launched today in Brussels. The Coalition Against Unlawful Surveillance Exports (CAUSE) – which
