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Content type: News & Analysis
As part of Privacy International's investigation into the mass surveillance industry we have examined hundreds of legal documents, brochures and, most recently, patents. Patents are a form of intellectual property; patent-holders publicly disclose their inventions in exchange for the exclusive rights to use and commercialise them for a limited period of time. Patent registries therefore provide a window into the otherwise murky world of the mass surveillance industry.
We believe…
Content type: News & Analysis
Last week’s revelation that Bahraini human rights activists have been targeted by advanced surveillance technology made by British company Gamma is yet another nail in the coffin of privacy and freedom of expression in Bahrain.
Over the past ten years, Bahraini citizens, among the most internet-connected in the Middle East, have been subjected to increasingly oppressive controls on and intrusions into their online and offline lives. The internet is heavily patrolled, and free…
Content type: News & Analysis
Bloomberg reported today that security researchers have identified FinFisher spyware - "one of the world’s best-known and elusive cyber weapons" - in malicious emails sent to Bahraini pro-democracy activists, including a naturalized U.S. citizen who owns gas stations in Alabama, a London-based human rights activist and a British-born economist in Bahrain.
Analysis of the emails by CitizenLab (a project based within the University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs) revealed that…
Content type: News & Analysis
The first joint report from the Committees on Arms Export Controls (CAEC), released last Friday, highlighted the importance of careful licensing and independent scrutiny for the export of ‘controlled’ goods, to prevent sales that could ‘facilitate internal repression’ in authoritarian regimes abroad. And as we wrote yesterday, the Committees advised that 10 Downing Street should make good on assurances PI was given in March that the problem of unlicensed surveillance exports would be addressed…
Content type: News & Analysis
The 2012 report of the Committees on Arms Export Controls (CAEC), released last Friday, has raised serious concerns over the government’s approach to arms exports, highlighting the use of British exports to facilitate repression and prolong conflict in authoritarian regimes abroad.
In his oral evidence to the Committees, the Foreign Secretary William Hague, stressed that the government’s position on granting export licences for goods on the Export Control list has not changed:
The long-…
Content type: Press release
The government today published a draft version of a bill that, if signed into law in its current form, would force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and mobile phone network providers in Britain to install 'black boxes' in order to collect and store information on everyone's internet and phone activity, and give the police the ability to self-authorise access to this information. However, the Home Office failed to explain whether or not companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter will be…
Content type: News & Analysis
For the past 18 months, I've been investigating the export of surveillance technologies from Western countries to despotic regimes, but I never thought I'd see a democratic government proposing to install the kind of mass surveillance system favoured by Al-Assad, Mubarak and Gaddafi. Yet the Home Office's latest plans would allow the authorities unprecedented levels of access to the entire population's phone records, emails, browsing history and activity on social networking sites,…
Content type: News & Analysis
An astonishing 13-page investigation by Osman Kibar at Dagens Næringsliv has revealed that Norway has invested over $2 billion in 15 companies that manufacture and sell surveillance technologies - and that the government has no plans to divest investments in companies that are complicit in human rights abuses abroad.
The Norwegian national pension fund (commonly referred to as the "oil fund") is the world's largest sovereign wealth fund. The author of the Dagens Næringsliv…
Content type: Press release
In collaboration with the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian, Privacy International today published a database of all attendees at six ISS World surveillance trade shows, held in Washington DC, Dubai and Prague between 2006 and 2009. ISS World is the biggest of the surveillance industry conferences, and attendance costs up to $1,295 per guest. Hundreds of attendees are listed, ranging from the Tucson Police Department, to the government of Pakistan, to the International…