Citizen Lab has conducted research into this field covering Blue Coat, Gamma and Hacking Team.

Click here to read the full article.

The post Director Ron Deibert interviewed by Wall Street Journal appeared first on The Citizen Lab.

Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, has been in jail since pro-democracy demonstrations began in Bahrain two years ago. The center’s vice president, Said Yousif al-Muhafdha, has also been imprisoned on several occasions.

Mr. Muhafdha continues to fight for human rights even though the Bahraini government has clamped down on any opposition, intensifying its electronic surveillance. “No matter how I communicate, they know,” Mr. Muhafdha said in an interview. “The regime has sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment allowing it to spy on everything we do by social media, e-mail and phone.”

In a bid to prevent European companies from selling such equipment to Bahrain, the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, Reporters Without Borders and other nongovernmental organizations took action this month. They filed a complaint against two companies at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which represents the developed economies.

The O.E.C.D. has guidelines for “responsible business conduct,” including human rights. Its National Contact Point offices in the member states try to encourage businesses to observe the guidelines and encourage individuals or organizations to complain about questionable business practices.

For the full article, see http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/world/europe/19iht-letter19.html?smid=tw-share

The post An attempt to take tools from tyrants appeared first on The Citizen Lab.

It’s all so simple in the 1998 Disney movie Mulan. The heroine disguised as a boy joins the Chinese military to fight the enemy – armies of shadowy, faceless Huns that darken the horizon. Classic good versus evil.

Martin Münch says he knows who the bad guys are, and that he’s one of the good guys. The problem is many people don’t think he’s a good guy. To them, he’s on the wrong side of the Arab Spring. Some human rights groups accuse him of selling his software to totalitarian governments either knowingly or with flippant disregard for the use they can make of it.

Münch, 31, is a developer of spy software for computers and smartphones. Thanks to his FinFisher Trojan, the police and secret services can follow what somebody types into Google and says on Skype, and check out what they bought on their smartphone. Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) is testing FinFisher for possible use.

Münch is proud of his product, and for the first time he recently showed German journalists how it works. Up to this point, the media had not been given access to his development offices in Munich. The plaque out front reads: Gamma Group. Inside, a dozen staffers sit in front of screens.

For the full article, see here.

The post Meet the German jazz pianist selling spy software to totalitarian regimes appeared first on The Citizen Lab.

On 1st February 2013 Privacy International, together with the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, Bahrain Watch and Reporters without Borders, filed complaints with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) against Gamma International, a company that exports “FinFisher” (or “FinSpy”) intrusive surveillance software, and Trovicor GmbH, a German company (formerly a business unit of Siemens) which also sells internet monitoring and mass surveillance products. The complaints ask the UK and German National Contact Points (NCPs), to ascertain whether the technology companies have breached the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises by exporting surveillance products to Bahrain, where the authorities use such products in human rights abuses.

The OECD Guidelines is a key international instrument for promoting corporate social responsibility. The Guidelines are addressed by governments of adhering countries to enterprises that operate from or in those countries, and contain broad, non-binding recommendations for responsible business conduct, covering a range of issues such as labour, human rights, bribery, corruption and the environment.

For the full article, see here.

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The chickens are coming home to roost. Lars Nyberg resigned yesterday as CEO of TeliaSonera, the Sweden-based global telecommunications company, in the wake of an investigation into a 3G licensing deal in Uzbekistan.

It’s the first time a big telecom CEO has quit over a scandal in emerging markets. For a decade, telcos have relied on foreign subsidiaries and far-flung partner groups with questionable records on corruption and human rights. They’re now starting to pay the price.

Though TeliaSonera was cleared of bribery and money-laundering charges, an independent audit faulted the company for failing to do due diligence when paying 2.3 billion kronor ($350 million) for the license in 2007 from a shell firm, Takilant, which allegedly has ties to to Gulnara Karimova, daughter of dictatorial Uzbek President Islam Karimov. Last fall, Nyberg gave his word that if the corruption charges proved true, he would resign. To his credit, he stepped down, even when cleared of explicit wrongdoing.

But it’s about more than just one company.

Nyberg’s resignation comes exactly two years since telecoms shocked the world by disconnecting Egypt from the internet during the uprising against Hosni Mubarak, at Mubarak’s request. (My organization, Access, has a Telco Hall of Shame that documents this and other inglorious moments in recent telecoms history.) It is clear that a pattern has emerged: In chasing profits in emerging markets, telecoms are facing difficult choices and overlooking laws, whether domestic, international, or simply moral.

For the full article, see here.

The post TeliaSonera’s Uzbekistan scandal is a warning to telecom CEOs everywhere appeared first on The Citizen Lab.

In December of last year, the German public prosecutors’ office had declared that there was no legal basis for the use of the so-called “Bundestrojaner” spyware, which was used to spy on German citizens. On top of it being illegally used, it was also found to be of very poor quality by extensive research performed by the Chaos Computer Club. In a surprising turn of events, German political platform NetzPolitik.org has now uncovered secret documents belonging to the Ministry of Finance, that the Ministry of the Interior sent to the Bundestag (the political seat of Germany) that reveals the German Federal Police’s intention to use Gamma Group’s Finfisher spyware to do the exact same thing.

Finfisher is quite an elaborate suite that allows for remote take-over of both computer systems and mobile devices such as iPhones, Androids, Blackberries and Windows Mobile-phones by pretending to be a software update. Gamma Group sells this product to dictatorial regimes all over the world, and that says a lot. What is also quite interesting is the presence of the logo for the UK’s Home Office and a link to its’ premier Security & Policing Exhibition. Does this imply that the UK government also purchased this product? Wikileaks recently published a document that looks likeFinfishers’ marketing brochure and it is certainly geared towards the more modern police forces, as it sports solid integration with LEMF, which stands for Law Enforcement Monitoring Facility.

In august of last year, Bloomberg published an article that reported Finfisher presence on 5 continents and analysis performed by Rapid7 indicated its presence in at least Australia, the Czech Republic, Dubai, Ethiopia, Estonia, Indonesia, Latvia, Mongolia, Qatar, Bahrain and the United States. Now, of course this is not concrete proof that these governments actually use Finfisher, but Gamma Group is based in the UK and they have placed this software in the category of goods requiring an export permit because of the restrictions on exporting such digital weapons. Combined with how Gamma specifically markets Finfisher as ‘Governmental IT intrusion‘, it is highly unlikely that the British government would allow legitimate export to be done to just anyone. In a similar story posted by the New York Times, Bloomberg spoke to Martin J. Muench, who is managing director of Gamma International, and he stated that they had not sold their product to Bahrain and the malware that was found must have either been a stolen demonstration copy, or reverse-engineered by criminals.

For the full article, see

The post Trojans for the Bundestag – German PD acquired Finfisher appeared first on The Citizen Lab.

In the secretive world of surveillance technology, he goes just by his initials: MJM.

His mystique is such that other security professionals avoid using wireless Internet near him. MJM himself suggests that those he meets allay their paranoia by taking batteries out of their mobile phones.

MJM — Martin J. Muench — is the developer of Andover, U.K.-based Gamma Group’s FinFisher intrusion software, which he sells to police and spy agencies around the world for monitoring computers and smartphones to intercept Skype calls, peer through Web cameras and record keystrokes.

In the past year, the hacker-turned-executive has himself been under attack as the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings unravelled the cloak of secrecy he’d operated behind.

FinFisher’s once-elusive FinSpy tool has been exposed targeting activists from the Persian Gulf kingdom of Bahrain; decoded for the first time by computer-virus hunters; placed under export control by the U.K.; and traced to countries with poor human rights records, such as Turkmenistan in Central Asia.

For the full article, see here.

The post MJM as personified evil says spyware saves lives not kills them appeared first on The Citizen Lab.

By endorsing amendments proposed by Dutch Member of European Parliament Marietje Schaake (D66/ALDE) the European Parliament wants EU export control regulation to include additional binding export controls for technologies that are used by authoritarian regimes to monitor, track and trace citizens. Companies should ask for export authorization if they have reasons to believe that certain exports might harm human rights. The Parliament also calls for an EU-wide application of the additional licensing requirements, EU Member States are obliged to block exports of technologies to countries facing emergency situations. “This is a big step forward in our battle against digital arms trade. It is unacceptable that regimes in Syria and Iran can use European technologies to violate human rights, let alone that European companies are actively involved in that”, Schaake Says.

For the full text, see here.

The post European Parliament endorses stricter European export control of digital arms appeared first on The Citizen Lab.

On a Monday in July, Ahmed Mansoor sat in his study in Dubai and made the mistake of clicking on a Microsoft Word attachment that arrived in an e-mail, labeled “very important” in Arabic, from a sender he thought he recognized.

With that click, the pro-democracy activist unwittingly downloaded spyware that seized on a flaw in the Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) program to take over his computer and record every keystroke. The hackers infiltrated his digital life so deeply they still accessed his personal e-mail even after he changed his password.

Since then, Mansoor, 42, an electrical engineer and father of four, says he has suffered two beatings by thugs in September during his campaign for citizens’ civil rights in the Persian Gulf federation of the United Arab Emirates. While those assailants remain unknown, researchers say they’ve figured out what was behind the virtual assault.

The spyware that penetrated his laptop appears to be a Western-made surveillance tool sold to police and intelligence agencies that’s so powerful it can turn on webcams and microphones and grab documents off hard drives, according to the findings of a study being published today by the University of Toronto Munk School of Global Affairs’ Citizen Lab.

For the full article, see here.

The post Spyware leaves trail to beaten activist through Microsoft flaw appeared first on The Citizen Lab.

Commodity Jurisdiction Final Determinations

The Commodity Jurisdiction Results table is sorted by CJ Case Number. To change the sort order click on the column header. To sort mulitple columns simultaneously hold down the shift key and click a second column header.

To search for a specific word within the table use the Find function by pressing the Ctrl and F keys at the same time. A search box should then appear. Type in your word you are looking for and hit the Find Next button.

To see the complete list, click here.

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