Software is very, very good at reducing costs – including, it seems, the cost of suppressing political dissent.
Software companies are selling with little restriction spying and hacking tools to governments interested in quashing human-rights workers, political dissidents and journalists. Though the target clients are often authoritarian states, the companies are frequently in the liberal democracies of Europe and America.
The reason (brace yourself) is money. These kinds of deals, which also include training people in using the software to spy on dissidents, can be worth five- and six-figure sums. That’s a big sale for a small team of software writers. For a dictatorship, it may be less than the laundry bill on secret police uniforms.
As a result, a human-rights activist in the United Arab Emirates has been beaten, robbed and fired from his job. He was one of 1,100 people the government contracted to spy on.
The Italian company that carried out the work for the Emirates says it is no longer working with that government, but that is largely because Italy won’t let it export there. Italy only found out because this team of ace hackers was hacked.
There are many other companies happy to step in and make such sales, and in many places such exports are not well known or understood.
In our highly networked world, software has become as important a tool of control as guns, but international arms merchants are far more regulated.
There are signs that is changing. Last October, the Obama administration charged two men with smuggling to Syria equipment that could be used to spy on dissidents.
The people in that case, however, appeared to be moving offshore hardware as well as software. Those physical boxes are easier to see than pure software, which could in theory be transferred to a neutral country, then sold to a dictatorship.
As more of the network is modelled in software, without specialty hardware required, the harder it may be to catch the arms merchants of the online world.