How the Arab Spring blew the lid off the commercial spyware When Middle Eastern governments fell in the Arab Spring uprisings, one of the side effects was that hard evidence of dodgy practices by commercial spyware vendors was made public. Unfortunately, the result is putting us all at risk. Documents uncovered when the Mubarak regime fell showed that the Egyptians had bought …
"But the proposed rules have already chilled research efforts."
They are moaning about the unintentional[citation needed] effects of the proposed changes to Wassenaar.
The final text of laws after being expelled from legislative bodies often smell from the digestive processes involved. Sausage making is more transparent and has fewer harmful inclusions.
"As a result governments acted. The British government put restrictions on Gamma until they fled the country, the French acted against Amesys, and the US government has now amended the Wassenaar Arrangement to deal with the issue."
And then they went and abraded Lybia and Syria to the stone age under the banner of "regime change/making the Middle East safe for Israel"
THE END!
And then they went and abraded Lybia and Syria to the stone age under the banner of "regime change/making the Middle East safe for Israel"
Well, actually they'd already done it to Libya (and Iraq, and Afghanistan). In Egypt of course, democracy produced the wrong result for the Yanks, so they supported a counter-coup and it's again governed by the army.
What I don't think the article really highlights is the extent to which the western authorities weren't making these changes to support dissidents, but to try and protect their own ongoing surveillance programs, both domestic mass surveillance, and international mass and targeted surveillance. If the consequence of hiding their own dirty laundry allows criminal malware interests to flourish, at the expense of private and commercial misery, that's a price that the Five Spies Stasi are quite willing for the rest of us to pay.
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