Mario Trujillo and David Greene write: Over the past month, the independent news outlet Indybay has quietly fought off an unlawful search warrant and gag order served by the San Francisco Police Department. Today, a court lifted the gag order and confirmed the warrant is void. The police also promised the court to not seek…
Category: Surveillance
Spyware makers express concern after US sanctions spyware veteran
On March 8, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reported: Earlier this week, the U.S. government announced sanctions against the founder of a controversial government spyware maker, Tal Dilian, and his business associate, Sara Aleksandra Fayssal Hamou. In announcing the sanctions, U.S. Treasury officials accused Dilian and Hamou of developing and selling spyware that was then used to target Americans, including U.S….
Judge orders NSO to cough up Pegasus super-spyware source code
Thomas Claburn reports: NSO Group, the Israel-based maker of super-charged snoopware Pegasus, has been ordered by a federal judge in California to share the source code for “all relevant spyware” with Meta’s WhatsApp. The order [PDF] from Judge Phyllis Hamilton at the end of last month stems from WhatsApp’s 2019 lawsuit [PDF] against NSO for allegedly spying on 1,400…
Backdoors that let cops decrypt messages violate human rights, EU court says
Ashley Belanger reports: The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that weakening end-to-end encryption disproportionately risks undermining human rights. The international court’s decision could potentially disrupt the European Commission’s proposed plans to require email and messaging service providers to create backdoors that would allow law enforcement to easily decrypt users’ messages. This ruling came after…