Perspective: SurveillancePrivate Surveillance Is a Lethal Weapon Anybody Can Buy

Published 22 July 2019

High-tech surveillance technology, once the purview of sophisticated spy services in wealthy countries, is now being offered by private contractors around the world as part of a highly secretive multibillion-dollar industry. While other kinds of weapons are subjected to stringent international regimes and norms — even if these are often broken — the trade in spy technology is barely regulated.

High-tech surveillance technology, once the purview of sophisticated spy services in wealthy countries, is now being offered by private contractors around the world as part of a highly secretive multibillion-dollar industry.

Sharon Weinberger writes in the New York Times that in the past year, there have been at least two high-profile reports that authoritarian states have used Western surveillance technology intended to track down criminals and terrorists to spy on journalists or political activists: The United Arab Emirates company DarkMatter allegedly spied on journalists (a claim the company denies); the Saudi government has been accused of using spyware made by the Israeli firm NSO Group to hack into the phone of a close associate of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi writer killed in his country’s consulate in Istanbul last October. And in the United States, security researchers are raising the alarm that cheaper versions of this technology are being used and abused by private consumers.

While other kinds of weapons are subjected to stringent international regimes and norms — even if these are often broken — the trade in spy technology is barely regulated. The American defense consultant, who shared materials and details so long as I agreed not to use his name or the name of his company because it would endanger his professional contacts abroad, was quick to point out that nothing in what he was proposing in 2014 was illegal. It still isn’t.