Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks has published files which show the existence of a thriving global industry which supplies surveillance tools to dictatorial regimes for spying on their citizens.
WikiLeaks
Assange said: “Today we release over 287 files documenting the reality of the international mass surveillance industry — an industry which now sells equipment to dictators and democracies alike in order to intercept entire populations.”
Some of the files are a result of the investigations carried out by WikiLeaks while some of the documents were found during the recent uprisings in Egypt and Libya when several offices were ransacked by irate protesters.
Simultaneously, Owni.fr – partner of WikiLeaks – made public the material which shows that a French electronics company, Amesys, has helped Qaddafi’s government spy on opposition leaders living abroad.
Amesys appears to have supplied the Libyan government even with the email addresses and pseudonyms of Libyan opposition leaders as a part of the manual given to the Libyan government to set up and administer a huge surveillance network which can intercept email, VOIP Calls, instant messages, search engine requests etc. The manual itself has been made public by Owni.
Amesys is reported to have reacted to the revelations with the statement: “Amesys delivered the Libyan authorities equipment and had no control over the use to which it was put.” (Oh, they didn’t know what the equipment was for! Surprising.)
The Wikileaks files show that some160 companies spread over 25 countries are involved in developing technologies which allow the mobile phones, emails, and browsing histories of individuals to be tracked and monitored.
The documents published on the WikiLeaks website include manuals for surveillance products sold to totalitarian Arab regimes.
Jacob Appelbaum, computer expert at the University of Washington and a former WikiLeaks spokesman said: “These systems that are revealed in these documents show exactly the kind of systems that the Stasi (East Germany’s secret police) wished they could have built.”
Eric King of Privacy International said: “Western governments cannot stand idly by while this technology is still being sold.”
Can one be sure that the rest of the so called democratic governments across the world have not been using similar equipment/system to carry out surveillance of individuals either for partisan political gains or ostensibly for for broader national/international interests?
We won’t be surprised if WikiLeaks stumbles on material which show that no government is lily-white in this matter of surveillance most of which is, to put it mildly, illegal and unethical.
Tags: Julian Assang WikiLeaks
