The mainstream media need to find a spine and start asking the Prime Minister some hard questions again about mass surveillance. I appreciate the last person to do that was John Campbell and he was killed off by Key’s personal friend and CEO of TV3, Mark Weldon, but someone needs to start acting like journalists again, so why not ask the media to get over a provincial rugby win and the christening of the 4th in line to the Royal throne and actually do some journalism.

This week a corporate hacking company called ‘Hacking Team’ were themselves hacked. They are hacking mercenaries for police forces and security agencies around the world. They have previously aided repressive regimes silence journalists and activists…

Surveillance software maker Hacking Team gets taste of its own medicine

Italy’s Hacking Team, which makes surveillance software used by governments to tap into phones and computers, found itself the victim of hacking on a grand scale on Monday. The controversial Milan-based company, which describes itself as a maker of lawful interception software used by police and intelligence services worldwide, has been accused by anti-surveillance campaigners of selling snooping tools to governments with poor human rights records. Hacking Team’s Twitter account was hijacked on Monday and used by hackers to release what is alleged to be more than 400 gigabytes of the company’s internal documents, email correspondence, employee passwords and the underlying source code of its products. “Since we have nothing to hide, we’re publishing all our emails, files and source code,” posts published on the company’s hijacked Twitter account said. The tweets were subsequently deleted. Company spokesman Eric Rabe confirmed the breach, adding that “law enforcement will investigate the illegal taking of proprietary company property”.

Rabe acknowledged that the company was recommending that clients suspend use of the snooping programs until Hacking Team determines whether specific law enforcement operations have been exposed. “We would expect this to be a relatively short suspension of service,” Rabe told Reuters. Hacking Team customers include the US FBI, according to internal documents published Monday. That agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment. One US privacy rights activist hailed the publication of the stolen Hacking Team documents as the “best transparency report ever”, while another digital activist compared the disclosures to a Christmas gift in July for anti-surveillance campaigners. Among the documents published was a spreadsheet that purports to show the company’s active and inactive clients at the end of 2014. Those listed included police agencies in several European countries, the US Drug Enforcement Administration and police and state security organisations in countries with records of human rights abuses such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. Sudan’s National Intelligence Security Service was one of two customers in the client list given the special designation of “not officially supported”. However, a second document, an invoice for 480,000 euros to the same security service, calls into question repeated denials by the Hacking Team that it has ever done business with Sudan, which is subject to heavy trade restrictions.

…what has any of this got to do with NZ you might ask? In the build up to the election last year, I wrote a blog on Hacking Team’s involvement in NZ…

The latest hate crime against our privacy that is being exposed is a corporate entity called Hacking Team that help Police use existing communications systems to hack in and spy on those the Police are hunting down. This is supposed to be for drug dealers and child rapists blah blah, but in reality of course it’s being used against activists and anyone deemed a political threat against the state. Each client gets their own server to use internally for each country. Australia has 4 servers to spy on, but here’s the spooky thing, NZ has 7 servers for these corporate hackers. Why the hell do we have almost twice as many spy servers as Australia does? How many people are the NZ Police spying on and for what purpose?

…now they are in the news again, perhaps a journalist would like to ask John Key the following questions…

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1. Why does Hacking Team have 7 servers in NZ?

2. What work are they doing for NZ government departments in the wake of the mass surveillance law change?

3. How ethical is it to use a corporate hacking team that work with repressive regimes?

4. If they are employed by NZ government departments, what oversight is there on them and who are they answerable to?

5. Why would a corporate hacking team have so many servers in NZ?

6. What if any information they obtain is available to anyone else?