Digital rights activist Esra’a Al Shafei found FinFisher spyware on her device more than a decade ago. Now she’s made it her mission to surveil the companies providing surveillanceware, their customers, and their funders.
“You cannot resist what you do not know, and the more you know, the better you can protect yourself and resist against the normalization of mass surveillance today,” she told The Register.
To this end, the Mozilla fellow founded Surveillance Watch last year. It’s an interactive map that documents the growing number of surveillance software providers, which regions use the various products, and the investors funding them. Since its launch, the project has grown from mapping connections between 220 spyware and surveillance entities to 695 today.
These include the very well known spy tech like NSO Group’s Pegasus and Cytrox’s Predator, both famously used to monitor politicians, journalists and activists in the US, UK, and around the world.
They also include companies with US and UK government contracts, like Palantir, which recently inked a $10 billion deal with the US Army and pledged a £1.5 billion ($2 billion) investment in the UK after winning a new Ministry of Defense contract. Then there’s Paragon, an Israeli company with a $2 million Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contract for its Graphite spyware, which lets law enforcement hack smartphones to access content from encrypted messaging apps once the device is compromised.
Even LexisNexis made the list. “People think of LexisNexis and academia,” Al Shafei said. “They don’t immediately draw the connection to their product called Accurint, which collects data from both public and non-public sources and offers them for sale, primarily to government agencies and law enforcement.”
Accurint compiles information from government databases, utility bills, phone records, license plate tracking, and other sources, and it also integrates analytics tools to create detailed location mapping and pattern recognition.
“And they’re also an ICE contractor, so that’s another company that you wouldn’t typically associate with surveillance, but they are one of the biggest surveillance agencies out there,” Al Shafei said.
It also tracks funders. Paragon’s spyware is boosted by AE Industrial Partners, a Florida-based investment group specializing in “national security” portfolios. Other major backers of surveillance technologies include CIA-affiliated VC firm In-Q-Tel, Andreessen Horowitz (also known as a16z), and mega investment firm BlackRock.
This illustrates another trend: It’s not just authoritarian countries using and investing in these snooping tools. In fact, America now leads the world in surveillance investment, with the Atlantic Council think tank identifying 20 new US investors in the past year.
[…]
They know who you are’
The Surveillance Watch homepage announces: “They know who you are. It’s time to uncover who they are.”
It’s creepy and accurate, and portrays all of the feelings that Al Shafei has around her spyware encounters. Her Majal team has “faced persistent targeting by sophisticated spyware technologies, firsthand, for a very long time, and this direct exposure to surveillance threats really led us to launch Surveillance Watch,” she said. “We think it’s very important for people to understand exactly how they’re being surveilled, regardless of the why.”
The reality is, everybody – not just activists and politicians – is subject to surveillance, whether it’s from smart-city technologies, Ring doorbell cameras, or connected cars. Users will always choose simplicity over security, and the same can be said for data privacy.
“We want to show that when surveillance goes not just unnoticed, but when we start normalizing it in our everyday habits, we look at a new, shiny AI tool, and we say, ‘Yes, of course, take access to all my data,'” Al Shafei said. “There’s a convenience that comes with using all of these apps, tracking all these transactions, and people don’t realize that this data can and does get weaponized against you, and not just against you, but also your loved ones.”
Source: Mozilla fellow Esra’a Al Shafei watches the watchers • The Register
Robin Edgar
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