Spy Software: Market Out of Control | tagesschau.de

Companies around the world make a lot of money with digital monitoring tools. Despite international demands, many countries show little ambition to regulate business.

Spy software is a popular commodity among autocrats, for example to spy on and suppress opposition activists, critical journalists or human rights activists. These digital weapons are easy to obtain. The states do not have to develop their own systems. Several companies around the world offer state-of-the-art surveillance technology for sale.

With the help of the programs, third-party computers or cell phones can be read out or the location can be determined. Some also make it possible to switch on the microphone or camera unnoticed by the user and thus use the device as a bug. Automatic facial recognition is also becoming more and more reliable. The market with these technologies has grown enormously in recent years. Experts assume a billion dollar business.

As early as 1995, the British civil rights organization Privacy International warned of the development. At that time, she listed more than 150 companies in her report that make money with surveillance technology.

Surveillance industry without restrictions

Meanwhile, the spread of surveillance technologies is “a global problem,” said the United Nations’ special envoy on freedom of expression, David Kaye, almost a quarter of a century later, in the summer of 2019. The private surveillance industry operates without any restrictions. Its sophisticated tools would be used by states and other actors to monitor journalists, politicians, lawyers or human rights defenders. Yet they are not subject to effective global or national control.

Kaye called for an international moratorium. The sale, transfer and use of surveillance technology should be stopped – at least until a legal framework that conforms to human rights has been created.

Years ago it had become clear how dangerous these digital weapons can be. In 2011, a number of dictatorships in the Middle East brutally suppressed uprisings after the Arab Spring – for example in Libya, Syria and Bahrain. There were indications that the local security authorities and secret services had acquired the most modern surveillance technology in the years before.

Doing business with authoritarian regimes

Suppliers included European companies. For example, Siemens supplied network monitoring technology to the regime in Syria in 2000. The company confirmed that ARD magazine fact. In 2007 the Siemens division became part of the new Nokia Siemens Networks. This continued to deliver to Syria – around 2008 a “Monitoring Center” for the telephone company. The German-Finnish consortium has apparently also supplied security authorities in Bahrain with its technology.

In 2009, Siemens Nokia Networks sold the spy software business after it became known that Iran was one of the customers. But the successor company and many other companies around the world continue to earn money with surveillance technology – also by doing business with authoritarian regimes.

After the brutal end of the Arab Spring, a number of states had promised to make the export of surveillance technology subject to stricter conditions. They drew up an agreement on the export control of surveillance systems – as a supplement to the so-called dual-use regulation. It refers to goods and technology that can be used for both civil and military purposes.

The agreement was negotiated in the Dutch city of Wassenaar. Since 2013, software has also been listed as a possible armament technology in the agreement, and since 2015 so-called infiltration software, which is used to secretly access data. In the meantime, more than 40 states, including the USA, Russia and all EU countries except Cyprus, have signed the agreement and committed to controlling exports and informing each other about rejected deliveries. But if you don’t stick to it, you have little to fear. The agreement is only politically binding, not legally binding.

New EU regulation from September

Obviously, the agreement did not result in the export of spyware programs being completely prevented. This was shown, for example, by research by Dutch journalists. In the period from 2014 to 2017, the EU allowed 317 exports of spy technology. She turned down only 14 applications during the same period.

From Germany, too, programs and systems for surveillance continued to reach various countries around the world. According to the Federal Government’s answers to questions from the FDP parliamentary group, between 2015 and 2020, spying technologies worth a total of more than 31 million euros were exported to, among others, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Egypt.

The European Union now wants to regulate exports more strictly. After around ten years of negotiations, the Council of the EU and the European Parliament agreed on a new regulation on the export control of dual-use goods. It comes into force in September. It is particularly about goods for digital surveillance, “which can be misused in connection with human rights violations,” said Federal Minister of Economics Peter Altmaier (CDU).

Organizations such as Reporters Without Borders or Amnesty International welcome the new regulation. From their point of view, however, it falls short and still leaves gaps. “Some member states have apparently given the interests of industry priority over their obligations to protect human rights,” said Reporters Without Borders, calling on countries to introduce stricter rules at national level.

Investigations against FinFisher

But even if the EU should actually control exports more closely in the future, the problem remains that companies can switch to other countries. Leaders in the development of surveillance technologies are companies in the USA and two countries that have not yet signed the Wassenaar Agreement: China and Israel. In addition, the digital weapons market is difficult to control. Software is much easier to export than tanks or missiles. The Munich public prosecutor’s office is currently investigating one of the world’s best-known manufacturers of surveillance technology, FinFisher. The company’s offices were raided last year. It is suspected that it exported to Turkey without a permit. FinFisher denies this.