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• For their eyes only: the commercialization of digital spying. Morgan Marquis-Boire, Citizen Lab and Canada Centre for Global Security Studies, May 2013, pp. 117.

For their eyes only: the commercialization of digital spying. Morgan Marquis-Boire, Citizen Lab and Canada Centre for Global Security Studies, May 2013, pp. 117.

01 August 2013

The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and the war in Libya brought to the world’s attention the role of telecommunications surveillance in upholding authoritarian regimes. Since then, there have been an increasing number of revelations about the production, sale and use of surveillance software in the press. This report provides the bigger picture of an industry that is growing fast. As noted in the introduction: “While hacking as a means of data-gathering has existed since the inception of the Internet, in the last few years the rise of an industry providing commercial intrusion and malware as lawful interception products has grown,” with it now worth an estimated $5 billion a year. Ten years ago, it was worth “nothing”. For their eyes only grew out of research into the use of surveillance software in Bahrain, where ongoing unrest against a despotic government has been quelled in part by the use of surveillance software to gather information on dissidents. In particular, Gamma International’s FinFisher has been identified as having been used by the Bahraini authorities, and the first chapter in the report examines the use of this software in the Gulf country, providing technical details of how it works and providing further recommendations on how to combat its use. Other chapters detail the infection of smart phones, the use of “backdoors” by the authorities, and the global reach of Gamma’s FinFisher software.

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