Revealed in detail: World powers stuff spyware kit, how-to guides in dodgy nations' pockets

The world's most powerful governments are today accused of bankrolling surveillance kit and training for smaller and dubious nations – and the tech industry stands to benefit. In a dossier published on Tuesday, civil-rights warriors Privacy International said that top governments – from the US, UK and China to France, Germany …

[Anonymous Coward]

What a great world we live in!

Corruption and graft spreading everywhere. :(

"The US spent more than $20n in security aid in 2017"

Is that 20 nanodollars?

[elDog]

99.44% of these security systems are equipped with phone-home

Depending on the outfit/state that is supplying these "systems", virtually everyone will have the capability to tell the seller who's doing what and to whom.

Not that this is critical since most closed systems rely on backdoors to monitor/update software. The krims will have already discovered the backdoors before the sellers can put their monitoring infrastructure in place.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sad but true

and some went in and trained the people them selves, then stirred them up to start trouble.

needed an excuse to act in the region, as it's better than shooting them selves in the foot, which they do regularly

[A-nonCoward]

nothing new here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

[Kevin McMurtrie]

Spying to make happy customers

What isn't spyware these days? It's hardly regulated and most people don't mind if their software phones home with unspecified data. Most people don't even mind if that spyware is buggy and can be re-purposed for new uses.

[John Savard]

Missing name

What, Russia isn't doing it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Missing name

Nah, we take that as read. Actually, what the US is doing should not exactly be news either.

[Anonymous Coward]

Citizen lab out of Toronto did a similar report back in March

Excellent report including links to packet capture files (pcap) and redirect headers used.

https://citizenlab.ca/2018/03/bad-traffic-sandvines-packetlogic-devices-deploy-government-spyware-turkey-syria/

[John Smith 19]

I see. So data fetishism is also contagious.

Not only do they want to be able to spy on their own citizens 24/7/365 they want the rest of the world to do the same.

The world of Daniel Suarez's "Daemon" is starting (sadly) to look quite realistic (without the happyish ending).

[onefang]

Re: I see. So data fetishism is also contagious.

You want a happy ending after the worlds spies have massaged all our private bits and bytes? That'll cost extra.

[Pascal Monett]

Security aid ?

You mean making sure that the NSA has access, right ?

Don't try to tell me the contrary, I won't believe you.

[Aodhhan]

It's the snowflake way

If we yell loud enough with a message which is just corny enough (it doesn't have to be true), somebody will eventually believe it, provide us a forum, and we will be smart and important.

Anyone can publish anything. Doesn't mean it's worth its weight in dog crap.