Global surveillance supermarket offered to dictators
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, the pressure group Privacy International and several media organisations.
Posted online today, the tranche of 287 documents 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.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 to harvest traffic going into and leaving a nation.
Keep reading: One Per Cent: Global surveillance supermarket offered to dictators.
