Mexican Drug Cartels with High-Tech Spyware
Sophisticated spyware, sold by surveillance tech companies to Mexican government agencies, are ending up in the hands of drug cartels:
As many as 25 private companies—including the Israeli company NSO Group and the Italian firm Hacking Team—have sold surveillance software to Mexican federal and state police forces, but there is little or no regulation of the sector—and no way to control where the spyware ends up, said the officials.
Lots of details in the article. The cyberweapons arms business is immoral in many ways. This is just one of them.
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Clive Robinson • December 17, 2020 9:36 AM
@ ALL,
Remember tools software or otherwise care not the hand that holds them, or to what task they are put. The tools have no morals nor can they ever have[1].
Morals are as far as we can tell a human inovation to provide excuses for behavior driven essentialy by a form of greed.
Thus it is the directing mind that is immoral and the definition of immoral is a movable feast.
When you read the article, understand it is the same base drivers for the Israeli Government and other “supplying nations” Governments as it is in individuals of the Mexican Government.
It’s been noted in the past that both the UK and US have used any technology they can against their own polititians, journalists, protestors, and inconvenient Whistleblowers.
Ask why it should be OK for the UK and US but not other nations including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Quata, and many many others including France.
It’s an excuse for psychopathic behaviour that gives rise to the excuses for the other 75-95% of the population they see as gullible or stupis. It’s those, “We are the good guys”, “For the common good”, “for God King and Country” etc, that hides the “Might is right”, “divine rule”, “God told me to”, of Kings in times past. But worse those who know it’s wrong acquiescing via “My country right or wrong”…
Such tools only exist because ordinary people alow them to be made. That is we alow specifications that have loop holes big enough for battle ships to sail through, protocols more permisive than a cat in heat, implementations riddled with more holes than termite infested wood.
Each and every one we let get by is going to be found and used for harm to someone some how it may be some one we know nothing about or someone you deeply care about.
The word “Engineer” had a different meaning a century and a half or so ago. They were the men who designed, built and deployed the engines and fortifications of war.
It was as these engines and fortifications became so important to the spilling of blood and scheding of lives that ethics started to enter the proffessions, and people started to say “enough” and “not in my name”, but for some reason we appear to have lost sight of previous generations of ethics.
But what are we doing about it?
Now might be a time to rediscover ethics, but will we be alowed to. Technology has moved on almost unimaginably in recent years as such it has acted as a force multiplier, we can now all be spied upon without our knowledge by things we can not see nor are we alowed to see by “Walled Gardens” that have taken the simple right of control of our posessions away from us and vested it in others over whom we have no individual control.
I’ll leave others to consider the mess we are in due to our own stupidity, and think up ways out against the enemy driven by greed for money and or power…
[1] One of the ideas proposed for military drones and such like is that they be fitted with some form of AI. The idea is of course madness to anyone that understands technolog. But to others, it makes a good talking point, but of course must be removable by the right people. It’s a war we are going to have to fight, just like the Crypto-Wars we are still fighting and loosing.