On Tuesday, the United Nations Security Council met to discuss the dangers of commercial spyware, marking the first time this type of software — also known as government or mercenary spyware — has been discussed at the Security Council.
The aim of the meeting, according to the US mission to the UNit was to “address the consequences of the proliferation and misuse of commercial spyware for the maintenance of international peace and security.” The United States and 15 other countries called the meeting.
While the meeting was mostly informal and did not end with concrete proposals, most of the countries involved, including France, South Korea and the United Kingdom, agreed that governments must take action to control the spread 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 abuses since 2012, gave testimony in which he sounded the alarm about the proliferation of spyware created by “a secret global ecosystem of developers, brokers , middlemen and boutique firms’, which ‘threatens international peace and security as well as human rights’.
Scott-Railton called Europe a “hotbed of spyware abuse” and fertile ground for spyware companies, citing a recent TechCrunch investigation that showed Barcelona has become a hub for spyware companies in recent years.
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Representatives of Poland and Greece, countries that have had their own spyware scandals involving software made by NSO Group, and Intellexarespectively, intervened and.
Poland’s representative pointed to local legislative efforts to put “more control, including by the judiciary, on the relevant operational activities of security and intelligence services,” while acknowledging that spyware can be used legally. “We are not saying that the use of spyware is never justified or even required,” the Polish representative said.
And the Greek representative pointed to the country’s 2022 bill to ban the sale of spyware.
Russia, on the other hand, blamed the United States. The Russian representative, referring to historic revelations about NSA spying by US whistleblower Edward Snowden, said that “it was the United States in particular that created a real system of global surveillance and illegal interference in the private lives of its citizens and citizens of other countries and keep perfecting this system.”
China’s representative criticized the meeting itself, saying that “discussion of so-called commercial spyware and the maintenance of international peace and security puts the cart before the horse compared to the most harmful proliferation activities by governments.”
“Since the Stuxnet incident, the proliferation of advanced national cyber weapons has created a series of significant risks on the Internet, which are far more harmful than commercial spyware,” China’s spokesman said, referring to the Stuxnet malware that was developed. as part of a US-Israeli operation aimed at undermining Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
During the Biden administration, the US government has taken several actions against commercial spyware, including imposing sanctions on Israeli spyware makers NSO Group and Candiruas well as Greece-based Intellexa and its founder Tal Dilian. and imposing travel bans on people involved in the spyware industry. Last year, people who work or have worked in the spyware industry expressed concerns that sanctions and other punitive measures would affect them personally.
