By Andrea Peterson
Now we know what it takes to get your hacking tools taken away if you’re a repressive government.
It’s not enough to get caught spying on U.S.-based journalists — or even to have the story plastered on the front page of a major U.S. newspaper. But if you get caught doing it again because of your own sloppiness, that may just be enough to shame your vendor into cutting you off.
That’s what the public is now learning from a massive trove of e-mails and documents released online this week from Italian company Hacking Team, which was itself hacked.
Hacking Team is part of a burgeoning commercial surveillance industry that critics allege sells hacking tools once reserved for the most advanced intelligence agencies to any country that can pay. The company has long had a policy of not identifying its customers and has responded to previous reports of abuse by saying it has an internal process for responding to allegations of human rights abuses.
The e-mail cache, now archived by WikiLeaks, appears to show that the company relied on a biannual report from an international law firm to determine which countries it can legally sell its products and faced pressure from the United Nations and the Italian government over business relationships with repressive regimes. Last fall, the company briefly faced a ban on the export of its products by the Italian government, according to the e-mails. Around the same time, the company’s chief operating officer wrote in an e-mail that it had suspended Sudan as a client and that it was a “sensitive” time for the company.
But e-mails sent in the aftermath of a March report about Hacking Team tools being used by the Ethiopian government to target journalists based in the United States appear to show that the sloppiness of their Ethiopian customers, which exposed the use of the company’s technology, was a bigger concern for the company than potential human rights violations. And later, the company tried to secure a new contract with the country.
Researchers with Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs discovered traces of Hacking Team’s tools on the computers of U.S.-based Ethiopian journalists, as reported in a front-page story by The Post in February of 2014. The Ethiopian government has a notoriously poor track record on freedom of the press, and Ethiopians living abroad play a significant role in providing independent news coverage of the country’s domestic situation.