This story is so preposterous that I am going to play a little game called; “who are the hypocrites here.” Hacking Team, who recently fell to a cyber attack have released a statement claiming to be victims and have bluntly claimed that they have “always operated with the law and regulation in an ethical manner.”
You heard it right, when government officials start inventing ludicrous laws which state that hacking citizen’s phones and computers for data is actually legal, you arrive at the juncture where the Italian spyware firm claim that “there was only one Violation of Law in this entire event, and this was “the massive cyber attack on the Hacking Team”
Now I don’t condone hacking, well I do in this case where rival decent hackers exposed nearly 50GB of data, this included internal documents such as internal emails, hacking tools zero day exploits, surveillance tools, source code for Spyware and a spreadsheet listing and every government client with date of purchase and amount paid.
Out of balance and to be fair to Hacking Team, I have viewed their statement and what really stands out is the following few lines.
“The company has always sold strictly within the law and regulation as it applied at the time any sale was made. That is true of reported sales to Ethiopia, Sudan, Russia, South Korea and all other countries”
Well, those are true democracies which really do underpin Hacking Teams morals. The scary thing is, if you give a despot surveillance tools, this could have well led to deaths and suffering of citizens.
There are no winners in these revelations with perceived democratic countries also using these tools along with many dodgy dictators. Hacking Team also state that “there had not been “access to the data collected by company’s clients using purchased spying software, as such information is only stored on the customer’s systems and can’t be accessed by the company itself.”
This is the tip of a seedy and unethical Iceberg, which in the long run, will not protect against every terrorist eventuality, but to only virtually incarcerate the whole world. Anyone who sells spying software to countries which have a habit of executing dissenters is either desperate for cash or completely void of conscious. A sale is possibly within the law, but so is selling a pint of beer to a 16-year-old if bought by an adult with a meal. The only difference is, a pint normally does not result in potential war crimes and more… usually.
Thank you to Hacker News for providing us with this information
Image courtesy of ilquotidianoitaliano
Only cause for any of these hackers , is to attack all Islamic fanatics and hack their sites , then and only then will they be seen in a better light
Why just Islamic? You make it sound like Islam is the only religion that has nut jobs in it…
I agree, but Islamic State (ISIS) is one of the biggest and most prominent terrorist/extremist societies around today. He said nothing bad about Islam as a religion, just the fanatics.