Civil society in Latin America rejects spy software … – IFEX

This letter was originally published in derechosdigitales.org on 7 July 2015.

On Sunday July 5th, publicly exposed 400GB of information from the Italian firm Hacking Team, dedicated to the marketing of software for government spying. The documents include invoices, emails, tax information and source code, among other files. The revelations allow us to understand the scope globally Hacking Team, a company that was listed in 2013 by Reporters Without Borders as one of the “enemies of the Internet”.

The spy software marketed by Hacking Team, also known as DaVinci or Galileo is a program that infects the person attacked devices, allowing data theft, messages, calls and emails. The attacker also gains access to microphone, camera and keyboard to record images, audio or any other activity without the knowledge of the person concerned.

In the leak was found that six countries in Latin America are clients of Hacking Team: Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico and Panama. Agencies like the Investigations Police of Chile (PDI), the Secretariat of Intelligence of Ecuador (SENAIN) the Directorate of Police Intelligence of Colombia (DIPOL) or the Center for Investigation and National Security of Mexico (CISEN) acquired software licenses remote control (RCS) to the Italian company. In the case of Mexico, identified as 14 individual contracts with the company, by the federal government and state governments, some of them without legal authority for the interception of private communications.

The civil society in Latin America reject the sale and purchase of these monitoring programs, without adequate controls, threatening human rights in the region, for the following reasons:

1. The purchase process was carried out with full opacity. We demand that the States concerned make efforts to ensure the transparency of its intelligence activities, in particular for the purchase and type of effective use of technologies that allow computer surveillance, to the real possibility that this software is being used to spy on activists and dissidents without cause. In 2013, the firm Kaspersky has already shown that DaVinci was used for spying on political activists in the Middle East.

2. Due to the low standards of legal control of the acquisition and use of surveillance technologies in the region, an open national Congress about the laws that govern and regulate surveillance activities, subject to public scrutiny discussion is needed. Given the technical possibility that these activities endanger human rights, these laws must reflect the highest standards and hold the actions of intelligence agencies to the prior authorization of an impartial and independent judicial body.

3. Monitoring the work of governments should be guided by the principle of proportionality, exhausting all possible legal remedies before violating the privacy of an individual. It should advocate for the less intrusive measures and the existence of points of strict control. Otherwise, not only the right to privacy is violated, it is an attack on freedom of expression, the right to information, freedom of movement and association; and the full exercise of human rights.

The company Hacking Team and the governments involved are responsible for such spying in the international arena. We demand that companies have a priority to respect for human rights and no contracts to provide services with oppressive and abusive governments. In the States, we demand that they respect the human rights of its citizens, to cease such illegal surveillance practices and transparent for the purpose of purchasing software, spent public budget in each case and both legal guarantees and procedural to prevent violation of rights .

Signatures

Digital Rights
Electronic Frontier Foundation
ARTICLE 19

Association for Civil Rights Foundation for Press Freedom
ACI-part (Honduras)
Contingent
MX (Mexico)

DATA (Uruguay)

Digital Swarm (Mexico)

RedPato2 (Colombia)
R3D
Network in Defense of Digital Rights (Mexico)

Karisma (Colombia) Foundation

Hiperderecho (Peru)

TeDIC (Paraguay)
Users
Digital (Ecuador)