Your smartphone can become a 24/7 surveillance device without you making a single wrong click  Four years ago, PPSA warned about the rise of “mercenary spyware” – powerful surveillance tools once reserved for elite intelligence agencies that were rapidly becoming available around the world. The poster child for this trend was Pegasus, the Israeli-developed “zero-click” spyware capable of silently taking over a smartphone, activating its camera and microphone, turning it into a full-time surveillance device that extracts nearly every detail of a person’s life. Human Rights Watch reports that the market for such dystopian surveillance technology is now truly global. A new investigation based on leaked Bulgarian export licenses reveals that a surveillance company called Circles received approval to export similarly sophisticated communications interception and phone-tracking technologies to a wide range of foreign governments between 2018 and 2023. According to the documents, Bulgarian authorities licensed exports to Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Ghana, Guatemala, Israel, Jordan, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Panama, Serbia, and the United Arab Emirates. The governments of many of these countries have been criticized by human rights organizations for surveillance abuses, restrictions on press freedom, and crackdowns on political dissent. Human Rights Watch concluded that the licenses raise serious questions about whether European export controls designed to prevent abusive surveillance exports are being enforced. What Can These Systems Do? The leaked documents describe a suite of surveillance products that far surpass traditional wiretaps. Unlike Pegasus, a “zero-click” capability that could remotely infect your smartphone without you making a single wrong click, Circles’ technology exploits chinks in the global telecommunications infrastructure, capturing your data as it is transmitted. Among the exported technologies were:
As one expert warned Congress in testimony highlighted by PPSA in 2022, capabilities once available only to a few nation-states are now available to dozens. CrowdStrike reports an 89 percent increase this year in AI-enabled attacks. The most advanced surveillance technologies are no longer confined to a handful of superpowers. They could be in the hands of almost any government – and, before long, in the hands of your competitors or personal enemies. In our next post on this topic, we will look at the corporate entities fomenting this global privacy disaster, the implications for privacy and democracy, and the need for Congress and the administration to develop responses. Comments are closed.
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