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On Tuesday, the UN Security Council held a meeting to discuss the dangers of commercial spyware, which marks the first time this type of software – also known as government or mercenary spyware – was discussed at the Security Council.
The purpose of the meeting, according to the US Mission to the UNwas to “address the implications of the proliferation and misuse of commercial spyware for the maintenance of international peace and security.” The United States and 15 other countries called for the meeting.
While the meeting was mostly informal and did not end with any concrete proposals, most of the countries involved, including France, South Korea and the United Kingdom, agreed that governments should act to control proliferation and commercial spyware abuse. Russia and China, on the other hand, dismissed the concerns.
John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab, a human rights organization that has been investigating spyware abuse since 2012, gave testimony in which he sounded the alarm about the proliferation of spyware made from “a secretive global ecosystem of developers, brokers, middlemen, and boutique firms,” which “threatens international peace and security and human rights.”
Scott-Railton called Europe “an epicenter of spyware abuse” and fertile ground for spyware companies, referring to a recent investigation by TechCrunch that showed that Barcelona has become a center for spyware companies in recent years.
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Representatives of Poland and Greece, countries that had their own spyware scandals involving software made by NSO Group and Intellexa respectively, also intervened.
representative of Poland he pointed to local legislative efforts to put “more control, including by the judiciary, on the relevant operational activities of the security and intelligence services”, and also recognize that spyware can be used legally. “We are not saying that the use of spyware is never justified or even necessary,” said Poland’s representative.
And the Greek representative pointed to the country’s 2022 project to ban the sale of spyware.
Russia, on the other hand, hit the United States. The Russian representative, referring to historical revelations of NSA spying by the US whistleblower Edward Snowden, he said that “it was specifically the United States that created a real system for global surveillance and illegal interference in the private lives of its citizens, and citizens of other countries , and continue to perfect this system.”
The representative of China criticized the meeting itself, saying that the discussion of “the so-called commercial spyware and the maintenance of international peace and security is putting the cart before the horse in comparison with the most harmful proliferation activities by governments”.
“Since the Stuxnet incident, the proliferation of advanced national cyber weapons have created a series of major Internet risks, which are much more harmful than commercial spyware,” said the representative of China, referring to the Stuxnet malware that was developed. as part of a US-Israeli operation aimed at sabotaging Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
During the Biden administration, the US government took several actions against commercial spyware, including sanction Israeli spyware makers NSO Group and Candiruand also based in Greece Intellexa and its founder Tal Dilian; and imposing travel bans against people involved in the spyware industry.
Last year, people who work or have worked in the spyware industry told TechCrunch expressed concern that the sanctions and other punitive measures would affect them personally.
