![\"Explosive](\"https:\/\/static.straitstimes.com.sg\/s3fs-public\/styles\/article_pictrure_780x520_\/public\/articles\/2021\/07\/24\/yq-isrl-24072021.jpg?itok=5Qrc0jui×tamp=1627131019\" "\\"\\"")
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PARIS (AFP) – Israeli’s NSO Group is in the eye of a storm over its Pegasus spyware – but it is far from the only company helping governments with their covert surveillance operations.<\/p>\n
Explosive claims that\u00a0Pegasus was used to spy on activists and even heads of state\u00a0have shone a spotlight on the software, which allows highly intrusive access to a person’s mobile phone.<\/p>\n
But NSO are merely one player in an industry that has quietly boomed in recent years, arming even cash-strapped governments with powerful surveillance technology.<\/p>\n
“These tools have gotten cheaper and cheaper,” said Ms Allie Funk, senior research analyst in technology and democracy at the United States think tank Freedom House.<\/p>\n
“So it’s not just the world’s foremost intelligence agencies that can purchase them – it’s smaller governments, or local police agencies.”<\/p>\n
Emerging economies such as India, Mexico and Azerbaijan dominate the list of countries where large numbers of phone numbers were allegedly identified as possible targets by NSO’s clients.<\/p>\n
Professor Ron Deibert, director of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab research centre, said such companies allowed governments to effectively “purchase their own NSA” – a nod to the US National Security Agency, whose own extensive surveillance was exposed by Mr Edward Snowden.<\/p>\n
The Citizen Lab scours the Internet for traces of digital espionage by governments.<\/p>\n
Just last week it published an investigation into another secretive Israeli company that sells spyware to foreign governments, Candiru.<\/p>\n
It appears to have been similarly used to target dissidents and journalists, from Turkey to Singapore.<\/p>\n
And in 2017, Citizen Lab found that Ethiopia had used spyware developed by Cyberbit – yet another Israeli firm – to infect the computers of exiled dissidents.<\/p>\n
“There are multiple factors why we see a lot of Israeli companies,” Prof Deibert said.<\/p>\n
One is the “openly entrepreneurial” attitude of Israel’s cyber-espionage agency Unit 8200, who “encourage their graduates to go out and develop start-ups after their military service”, he told AFP.<\/p>\n
He added there was “a strong suspicion” that Israel gains “strategic intelligence” from this technology being provided to other governments, siphoning off some of the information gathered.<\/p>\n
But while Israel is now facing calls for an export ban on such technology, it is not the only country hosting companies that sell off-the-shelf spyware.<\/p>\n
PARIS (AFP) – Israeli’s NSO Group is in the eye of a storm over its Pegasus spyware – but it is far from the only company helping governments with their covert surveillance operations. Explosive claims that\u00a0Pegasus was used to spy on activists and even heads of state\u00a0have shone a spotlight on the software, which allows … Continue reading Spyware for sale: the booming trade in surveillance tech<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.poplinks.sbs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.poplinks.sbs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.poplinks.sbs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.poplinks.sbs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.poplinks.sbs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1346"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.poplinks.sbs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1346\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.poplinks.sbs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.poplinks.sbs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.poplinks.sbs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}