Friday, December 02, 2011 2:53:17 AM
Global surveillance supermarket offered to dictators
Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent
21:45 1 December 2011
The ease with which totalitarian regimes can buy western technology to intercept and store every electronic communication made by their citizens has been revealed in a joint document release by Wikileaks [ http://www.wikileaks.org/ ], the pressure group Privacy International [ http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/12/01/surveillance-debunked-a-guide-to-the-jargon/ ] and several media organisations.
Posted online today, the tranche of 287 documents [ http://wikileaks.org/the-spyfiles.html ] details the wide choice of cellphone and internet surveillance technologies on offer from 160 intelligence contractors - and show, in part, that dissidents using common tools like Google's gmail service, or devices like Apple's iPhone and RIM's BlackBerry, stand little chance of hiding their missives from authoritarian regimes - unless they know how to use the Tor anonymising network [ https://www.torproject.org/ ].
Many of the surveillance firms appear to be operating in two distinct ways: offering technologies that adhere to legal surveillance norms in their home markets - but when it comes to selling to other nations, they adopt an "anything goes" approach to interception functionality. Some of the them, says Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, will even tap the global network of undersea telecommunications cables [ http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Technology/Pix/pictures/2008/02/01/SeaCableHi.jpg ]
to harvest traffic going into and leaving a nation.
The data has been gathered by researchers like Eric King at London-based Privacy International, who has been examining the wares on offer at arms fairs and surveillance industry conferences - many of which have been platforms for selling the kind of bulk email interception technology shown to have been used by the dictators recently ousted in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt.
A French company called Amesys [ http://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/list/company-name/amesys.html ], for example, was found to have helped Libya's late dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, monitor dissidents' webmail accounts - because it left their names in a poorly-redacted screenshot in a PDF of a sales document. "There are no rules to stop a company in a democratic country selling such software to a dictator," said Jean Marc Manach of OWNI [ http://owni.eu/ ], one of the media groups that worked with Wikileaks, speaking at the release event today. "This has to stop."
Calls for overseas sales of surveillance technology to be restricted are growing. Two bills have been proposed [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trade-in-surveillance-technology-raises-worries/2011/11/22/gIQAFFZOGO_story.html ] to limit such exports in the US, where the Washington Post today reported that a trade show for vendors peddling such technologies has earned the nickname the "Wiretappers' Ball [id.]". And in India, N Ram, editor-in-chief of The Hindu newspaper [ http://www.thehindu.com/ ], wants to see "a legal framework" established to control "the large passive interception of communications that's been going on in India since the Mumbai attacks."
© Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/12/surveillance-supermarket-offer.html [no comments yet]
===
WikiLeaks Unveils the Selling of Surveillance, Sort Of
Screenshot from the Amesys manual showing targets who were apparently under surveillance.
By Kim Zetter
December 1, 2011 | 3:41 pm
The WikiLeaks submission system may still be incommunicado, but the secret-spilling site woke up on Thursday to release a trove of marketing documents from surveillance companies hawking their wares to governments — though many were previously published by the Wall Street Journal or were already publicly available on the web.
The site published 287 documents that it says are part of a larger cache of hundreds of such documents that reveal price lists, manuals and marketing claims from companies like Blue Coat, whose spying technology is being used by Syria [ http://boingboing.net/2011/11/01/blue-coat-deep-packet-inspection-tools-used-by-syrian-secret-police-and-other-repressive-regimes.html ], as well as Nokia-Siemens, Lucent and other large technology firms that have been criticized in the past for selling their wares to oppressive regimes.
The documents so far are getting mixed reviews from critics who point out that the Wall Street Journal published more than 200 of the marketing documents last month [ http://projects.wsj.com/surveillance-catalog/ ] in an exposé focused on shining a light on the vast global market for off-the-shelf surveillance products.
The most salient leak in the WikiLeaks cache so far appears to be one discovered by WikiLeaks’ French media partner OWNI, which uncovered a screenshot from a manual created by the French surveillance firm Amesys [ http://owni.eu/2011/12/01/exclusive-how-gaddafi-spied-on-the-fathers-of-the-new-libya/ ] that shows the e-mail addresses and online pseudonyms of at least 40 people — poets, journalists, writers, historians and intellectuals — who played key roles among Libya’s opposition groups and were evidently being spied on with Amesys technology.
Until recently, seven of them were still living in exile: four in the UK, two in the US, one in Helsinki. Last August, one of them was appointed the Libyan ambassador in London. Another was one of 15 founding members of the National Transitional Council (NTC), created in March 2011 to coordinate the insurgency in Libya. He has since been appointed Minister for Culture.
While they were living in Britain and the United States, the electronic correspondence of all these figures was spied on by the extensive monitoring systems of Amesys, a French electronic warfare arms dealer which forms part of the Bull group.
Asked about their surveillance assistance to the dictatorial regime, Amesys told OWNI, “Amesys is a manufacturer of equipment. The use of the equipment it sells is exclusively the responsibility of its clients. Amesys has never had access to the use made of the equipment it sold to Libya.”
That doesn’t explain, however, how the names of Libyan activists ended up in a user’s manual for its spying software.
The documents are searchable on the WikiLeaks site [ http://www.wikileaks.org/The-Spyfiles ] by company name, product name and technology type — such as GPS trackers, video surveillance and internet traffic monitoring.
*
Previously
Deep-Packet Inspection in U.S. Scrutinized Following Iran Surveillance
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/deep-packet-inspection/
WSJ: Nokia, Siemens Help Iran Spy on Internet Users
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/wsj-nokia-and-siemens-help-iran-spy-on-internet-users/
Nokia-Siemens Spy Tools Aid Police Torture in Bahrain
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/08/nokia-siemens-spy-systems/
Consumers Boycott Nokia, Siemens for Selling to Iran
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/nokia-siemens-boycott/
*
Wired.com © Condé Nast Digital
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/wikileaks-unveils-surveillance/ [with comment]
===
Phone 'Rootkit' Maker Carrier IQ May Have Violated Wiretap Law In Millions Of Cases
11/30/2011 @ 4:04PM
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/11/30/phone-rootkit-carrier-iq-may-have-violated-wiretap-law-in-millions-of-cases/ [with comments]
===
more invisible hand of the free market doing God's work . . .
from earlier this string, (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=67656117 and preceding and following
Paul Marks, senior technology correspondent
21:45 1 December 2011
The ease with which totalitarian regimes can buy western technology to intercept and store every electronic communication made by their citizens has been revealed in a joint document release by Wikileaks [ http://www.wikileaks.org/ ], the pressure group Privacy International [ http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/12/01/surveillance-debunked-a-guide-to-the-jargon/ ] and several media organisations.
Posted online today, the tranche of 287 documents [ http://wikileaks.org/the-spyfiles.html ] details the wide choice of cellphone and internet surveillance technologies on offer from 160 intelligence contractors - and show, in part, that dissidents using common tools like Google's gmail service, or devices like Apple's iPhone and RIM's BlackBerry, stand little chance of hiding their missives from authoritarian regimes - unless they know how to use the Tor anonymising network [ https://www.torproject.org/ ].
Many of the surveillance firms appear to be operating in two distinct ways: offering technologies that adhere to legal surveillance norms in their home markets - but when it comes to selling to other nations, they adopt an "anything goes" approach to interception functionality. Some of the them, says Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, will even tap the global network of undersea telecommunications cables [ http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Technology/Pix/pictures/2008/02/01/SeaCableHi.jpg ]
to harvest traffic going into and leaving a nation.
The data has been gathered by researchers like Eric King at London-based Privacy International, who has been examining the wares on offer at arms fairs and surveillance industry conferences - many of which have been platforms for selling the kind of bulk email interception technology shown to have been used by the dictators recently ousted in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt.
A French company called Amesys [ http://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/list/company-name/amesys.html ], for example, was found to have helped Libya's late dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, monitor dissidents' webmail accounts - because it left their names in a poorly-redacted screenshot in a PDF of a sales document. "There are no rules to stop a company in a democratic country selling such software to a dictator," said Jean Marc Manach of OWNI [ http://owni.eu/ ], one of the media groups that worked with Wikileaks, speaking at the release event today. "This has to stop."
Calls for overseas sales of surveillance technology to be restricted are growing. Two bills have been proposed [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trade-in-surveillance-technology-raises-worries/2011/11/22/gIQAFFZOGO_story.html ] to limit such exports in the US, where the Washington Post today reported that a trade show for vendors peddling such technologies has earned the nickname the "Wiretappers' Ball [id.]". And in India, N Ram, editor-in-chief of The Hindu newspaper [ http://www.thehindu.com/ ], wants to see "a legal framework" established to control "the large passive interception of communications that's been going on in India since the Mumbai attacks."
© Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2011/12/surveillance-supermarket-offer.html [no comments yet]
===
WikiLeaks Unveils the Selling of Surveillance, Sort Of
Screenshot from the Amesys manual showing targets who were apparently under surveillance.
By Kim Zetter
December 1, 2011 | 3:41 pm
The WikiLeaks submission system may still be incommunicado, but the secret-spilling site woke up on Thursday to release a trove of marketing documents from surveillance companies hawking their wares to governments — though many were previously published by the Wall Street Journal or were already publicly available on the web.
The site published 287 documents that it says are part of a larger cache of hundreds of such documents that reveal price lists, manuals and marketing claims from companies like Blue Coat, whose spying technology is being used by Syria [ http://boingboing.net/2011/11/01/blue-coat-deep-packet-inspection-tools-used-by-syrian-secret-police-and-other-repressive-regimes.html ], as well as Nokia-Siemens, Lucent and other large technology firms that have been criticized in the past for selling their wares to oppressive regimes.
The documents so far are getting mixed reviews from critics who point out that the Wall Street Journal published more than 200 of the marketing documents last month [ http://projects.wsj.com/surveillance-catalog/ ] in an exposé focused on shining a light on the vast global market for off-the-shelf surveillance products.
The most salient leak in the WikiLeaks cache so far appears to be one discovered by WikiLeaks’ French media partner OWNI, which uncovered a screenshot from a manual created by the French surveillance firm Amesys [ http://owni.eu/2011/12/01/exclusive-how-gaddafi-spied-on-the-fathers-of-the-new-libya/ ] that shows the e-mail addresses and online pseudonyms of at least 40 people — poets, journalists, writers, historians and intellectuals — who played key roles among Libya’s opposition groups and were evidently being spied on with Amesys technology.
Until recently, seven of them were still living in exile: four in the UK, two in the US, one in Helsinki. Last August, one of them was appointed the Libyan ambassador in London. Another was one of 15 founding members of the National Transitional Council (NTC), created in March 2011 to coordinate the insurgency in Libya. He has since been appointed Minister for Culture.
While they were living in Britain and the United States, the electronic correspondence of all these figures was spied on by the extensive monitoring systems of Amesys, a French electronic warfare arms dealer which forms part of the Bull group.
Asked about their surveillance assistance to the dictatorial regime, Amesys told OWNI, “Amesys is a manufacturer of equipment. The use of the equipment it sells is exclusively the responsibility of its clients. Amesys has never had access to the use made of the equipment it sold to Libya.”
That doesn’t explain, however, how the names of Libyan activists ended up in a user’s manual for its spying software.
The documents are searchable on the WikiLeaks site [ http://www.wikileaks.org/The-Spyfiles ] by company name, product name and technology type — such as GPS trackers, video surveillance and internet traffic monitoring.
*
Previously
Deep-Packet Inspection in U.S. Scrutinized Following Iran Surveillance
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/deep-packet-inspection/
WSJ: Nokia, Siemens Help Iran Spy on Internet Users
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/wsj-nokia-and-siemens-help-iran-spy-on-internet-users/
Nokia-Siemens Spy Tools Aid Police Torture in Bahrain
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/08/nokia-siemens-spy-systems/
Consumers Boycott Nokia, Siemens for Selling to Iran
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/06/nokia-siemens-boycott/
*
Wired.com © Condé Nast Digital
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/wikileaks-unveils-surveillance/ [with comment]
===
Phone 'Rootkit' Maker Carrier IQ May Have Violated Wiretap Law In Millions Of Cases
11/30/2011 @ 4:04PM
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/11/30/phone-rootkit-carrier-iq-may-have-violated-wiretap-law-in-millions-of-cases/ [with comments]
===
more invisible hand of the free market doing God's work . . .
from earlier this string, (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=67656117 and preceding and following
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
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