THE discovery of a number of Pakistani private contractors who have been in contact with Hacking Team, a private company based in Italy that specialises in developing snooping software, reveals the lax controls and widespread interest in government departments for acquiring the capability to monitor and intercept private communications and hack mobile devices of citizens.
Not only can the software in question intercept emails, phone calls and all other messages, it can access all data stored in mobile phones as well as switch on the microphone and camera remotely to listen to and watch everything happening in a user’s surroundings.
Know more: Hacking Team hacked: The Pakistan connection, and India's expansion plan
The revelation comes from a large hack of the private company’s internal emails, which contains more than 1,000 emails exchanged between the management and Pakistani contractors claiming to be working for various law enforcement bodies as well as the telecom regulator. The emails contain a record of one payment, indicating that somebody did in fact purchase the software.
Notwithstanding the fact that surveillance equipment has become a necessity for security agencies operating in a murky world where terrorism can be enabled by technology, this is troubling for several reasons.
For one, in Pakistan such capabilities have been used to spy on politicians and judges, as well as human rights activists and journalists, as detailed in a recent report by Privacy International. For another, very few controls exist over how this capability will be used.
As recently as in June, during the proceedings of a 19-year-old suo motu case, the ISI disclosed before the Supreme Court that it had tapped thousands of phones over the preceding months; there is no clarity, however, as to what parameters were followed in deciding to place the wiretaps. And perhaps most importantly, the leaked emails show how far snooping technology is now spreading, going beyond traditional intelligence agencies to police departments and provincial intelligence agencies.
The email exchanges provide a glimpse into a very disturbing world where technologies designed to violate people’s private lives are being shopped from an online bazaar as if they were nothing more than cosmetics or music players.
Hacking Team undertook only the most pro forma and superficial vetting of the contractors they were approached by.
Considering that politicians and judges have themselves been the targets of these snooping tools, more must be done to legislate controls over this technology to ensure that it gets used only for purposes of fighting crime and terror.
Published in Dawn, July 29th, 2015
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