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Investigation Shows Egyptian Government Hacked A Dissident's Phone Twice, Using Two Different Companies' Malware

from the doublecheck-your-work-I-guess dept

Citizen Lab has uncovered more state-level spying targeting political opponents and journalists. There’s a twist to this one, though. One of those targeted had his phone infected by two forms of malware produced by two different companies. And yet another twist: both companies have their roots in Israel, which is home to at least 19 entities that develop phone exploits. Here’s the summary from Citizen Lab:

Two Egyptians—exiled politician Ayman Nour and the host of a popular news program (who wishes to remain anonymous)—were hacked with Predator spyware, built and sold by the previously little-known mercenary spyware developer Cytrox.

The phone of Ayman Nour was simultaneously infected with both Cytrox’s Predator and NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, operated by two different government clients.

Both targets were hacked with Predator in June 2021, and the spyware was able to infect the then-latest version (14.6) of Apple’s iOS operating system using single-click links sent via WhatsApp.

Ayman Nour, the lucky recipient of two different strains of malware, is the head of an opposition group who ran against former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Shortly after Nour’s election loss, he was jailed for allegedly forging signatures on petitions — a move generally recognized as retaliation from his victorious opponent.

The other target is a journalist now in exile who has been openly critical of Egypt’s new president.

Unsurprisingly, these attacks have been traced back to the Egyptian government. What’s more surprising is that attribution can be made since attackers using these powerful hacking tools usually do a little better covering their tracks.

We attribute the attacks on the two targets to the Egyptian Government with medium-high confidence. We conducted scanning that identified the Egyptian Government as a Cytrox Predator customer, websites used in the hacks of the two targets bore Egyptian themes, and the messages that initiated the hack were sent from Egyptian WhatsApp numbers.

Once again, powerful hacking tools deployed against government critics have been traced back to companies with an Israeli presence. NSO Group has always been located in Israel. Cytrox, however, has moved around, changing both its home base and its name several times to distance itself from its irresponsible malware sales. But the Times of Israel has the receipts.

Cytrox was part of a shadowy alliance of surveillance tech companies known as Intellexa that was formed to compete with NSO Group. Founded in 2019 by a former Israeli military officer and entrepreneur named Tal Dilian, Intellexa includes companies that have run afoul of authorities in various countries for alleged abuses.

Four executives of one such firm, Nexa Technologies, were charged in France this year for “complicity of torture” in Libya while criminal charges were filed against three company executives for “complicity of torture and enforced disappearance” in Egypt. The company allegedly sold spy tech to Libya in 2007 and to Egypt in 2014.

It appears there’s a healthy market for powerful phone exploits. But the market consists of unhealthy governments more interested in tracking and surveilling critics than engaging in counterterrorism or investigating serious criminal activity. NSO claims it only sells malware for those more acceptable reasons. Cytrox/Intellexa has never offered any such assurances, possibly because it has an international rap sheet that would immediately undercut its assertions.

It’s an ugly world out there. Plenty of companies operating out of free countries are willing to sell exploits to governments they know will abuse them to commit human rights violations. If NSO Group shuts down its malware arm, it won’t make things safer for dissidents, government critics, and journalists. There are plenty of companies willing to fill this void. And they’re very good about obscuring who they are and what they do.

But one thing is undeniable: malware merchants are enabling abusive governments and it’s going to take more than a few sanctions and fines to prevent this from happening in the future. So far, the countries these companies call home have done little about these residents who are making the world a worse place to live. That has to change. And it appears it’s going to be investigative journalists and security researchers applying the pressure through investigations and exposés. Governments need to stop abdicating their responsibilities and allowing private citizens with finite resources and zero power to do their work for them.

Filed Under: ayman nour, dissident, egypt, hacking, malware, pegasus, predator, spyware, surveillance
Companies: cytox, nso group

Content Moderation Case Study: Documenting Police Brutality (2007)

from the documenting-abuse-vs-promoting-abuse dept

Summary: Wael Abbas is an Egyption journalist/activist who began documenting protests in Egypt in 2006, including multiple examples of Egyptian police brutality, which he would then upload to YouTube.

In 2007, after posting a few explicit examples of Egyptian police brutality, he discovered that his entire YouTube account was shut down, taking down 181 videos covering not just police brutality, but also voting irregularities, and street protests. At first YouTube refused to comment on this, and only told Abbas that the account was shut down due to multiple complaints about the content.

Later, after the US press got ahold of the story, YouTube put out a statement saying:

Our general policy against graphic violence led to the removal of videos documenting alleged human rights abuses because the context was not apparent

Having reviewed the case, we have restored the account of Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas. And if he chooses to upload the video again with sufficient context so that users can understand his important message, we will of course leave it on the site

Wael believes that if large media organizations like Reuters and CNN hadn?t covered his case, that it was unlikely his account would have been restored, or that he would have been allowed to re-upload the videos.

Decisions to be made by YouTube:

Questions and policy implications to consider:

Resolution: As noted above, YouTube did reinstate his account, but as issues like this continued to arise, the company has adjusted its policies for handling violent but newsworthy content multiple times in the intervening years. At the time of writing this case study, Abbas? videos showing Egyptian police brutality from many years ago now contain content warnings saying that the content ?may be inappropriate for some viewers? and asking users to acknowledge that before being able to view the videos.

Abbas has faced many more content moderation challenges since then with his work in Egypt. Yahoo shut down his email account after getting complaints. Both Twitter and Facebook have suspended his accounts at times as well.

In both 2010 and 2018 Abbas was arrested in Egypt for his work, with Egyptian authorities using the social media account suspensions as evidence of his alleged crimes in ?spreading fake news.?

Filed Under: content moderation, documenting, egypt, journalism, police brutality, reporting, wael abbas

Egyptian Government Plans To Track The Movement Of 10 Million Vehicles With Low-Cost RFID Stickers

from the just-for-traffic-management,-you-understand dept

Just under three years ago, Techdirt wrote about China’s plan to install satnav tracking devices on vehicles in Xinjiang. That was just one of several early signs of the human rights abuses happening there. Today, people are finally waking up to the fact that the indigenous turkic-speaking Uyghur population is subject to some of the harshest oppression anywhere on the planet. Tracking huge numbers of vehicles might seem to be a typically over-the-top, money-no-object Chinese approach to total surveillance. Unfortunately, there are signs the idea is starting to spread, as this story in RFID Journal explains:

Egypt’s Ministry of Interior (MOI) plans to identify millions of vehicles as they travel on the country’s roads, using an RFID solution from Go+, with hardware and software provided by Kathrein Solutions in cooperation with Wireless Dynamics. The system, which will be implemented across approximately 10 million of the country’s vehicles throughout the next five years, consists of passive UHF RFID stickers attached to each car’s windshield, as well as tags on headlamps that respond to interrogation from readers installed above roadways, even at high speeds.

One justification for the move is to provide information on traffic flows. Another is to identify drivers who have been found guilty of traffic violations, and who should therefore not be on the roads. But plans to send all the data to a cloud-based data center will create a database that will eventually track every vehicle in the country. That will clearly be an invaluable resource for the country’s police and security forces, which unfortunately seem to take China’s approach to anyone who voices opposition to the authorities. Here’s what Human Rights Watch wrote in its most recent report on the country:

Since President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi secured a second term in a largely unfree and unfair presidential election in March, his security forces have escalated a campaign of intimidation, violence, and arrests against political opponents, civil society activists, and many others who have simply voiced mild criticism of the government. The Egyptian government and state media have framed this repression under the guise of combating terrorism, and al-Sisi has increasingly invoked terrorism and the country?s state of emergency law to silence peaceful activists.

As well as the negative impact on human rights in Egypt, there is another troubling aspect to this move. According to the RFID Journal article, the company providing the new system, Go+, is “in discussions with four other countries about the possibility of implementing this solution once the Egyptian system is fully deployed.” China’s mass tracking of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang using satnav devices pioneered the idea of carrying out vehicle surveillance on a hitherto unseen scale, regardless of the cost. Egypt’s use of the much cheaper RFID trackers represents a worrying evolution of the idea. If the roll-out is successful, it could encourage other governments to adopt a similar approach, to the detriment of civil liberties in those countries.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: egypt, privacy, rfid, tracking

EU Law Enforcement Preps To Start Sharing Sensitive Data With A Number Of Human Rights Abusers

from the gotta-destroy-lives-to-save-lives-I-guess dept

The EU Commission made a lot of noise about protecting the data of European citizens, resulting in the passage of a law that’s almost impossible to avoid breaking. I guess those protections won’t be extended to anyone a number of governments consider to be threats to national security. Even worse, this data will be shared with governments known for executing their critics. (h/t War On Privacy)

European Union officials have begun talks with counterparts in several Middle Eastern countries, including Egypt and Turkey, about proposed data-sharing deals that would allow Europol to exchange personal information about suspects with local law enforcement authorities.

In some circumstances, the deals could allow the transfer of data concerning a person’s race and ethnic origin, their political opinions and religious beliefs, trade-union memberships, genetic data and data concerning their health and sex life.

The deals are being sought by the EU as part of efforts to bolster counter-terrorism policing across the continent despite concerns being raised about the human rights records of the countries by the bloc’s own data protection watchdog.

When someone starts talking about terrorism and national security, all rational thought goes out the window. The EU will share data with Egypt, which recently made the news for executing nine people who claimed their “confessions” were tortured out of them.

Turkey isn’t much of an improvement, seeing how its government also likes to jail critics — going so far as to use other countries’ laws against foreigners to punish non-Turkish citizens for insulting the president.

It’s hard to see how all of the data being shared is relevant to multi-national terrorism investigations. In fact, much of what would be shared seems more like blackmail material than evidence tying people to terrorist groups or acts. Why else would the EU include data about targets’ sex lives?

In normal countries under normal circumstances, data about political and religious affiliations would be off limits, as would medical information and trade union memberships. This isn’t a case of creeping totalitarianism. This is full-blown enabling of existing totalitarian states, weaponizing the massive amount of data European law enforcement agencies collect on investigation targets.

The EU Commission claims this set of very personal data will only be disclosed if Europol believes it should be. Not very reassuring.

“The transfer of personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade-union membership, genetic data and data concerning a person’s health and sex life by Europol shall be prohibited, unless it is strictly necessary and proportionate in individual cases for preventing or combating criminal offences as referred to in the Agreement and subject to appropriate safeguards,” the directives say.

The same EU government that condemned Egypt’s ongoing human rights abuses has no problem giving it data ammo to use against critics, dissidents, and activists. It seems like the claims about “appropriate safeguards” will be ignored if Europol feels the data it could obtain from other countries necessitates increased quid pro quo. Whatever oversight Europol has is probably no better than any other massive law enforcement/counter-terrorist agency, which usually ranges from slim to none.

Human rights abuses aren’t going to stop as long as major nation-states continue to treat abusive governments as equals on the national security playing field. Just as certainly as Turkey has weaponized US-based social media moderation tools to silence critics, other governments seeking to permanently silence critics will weaponize this proposed data sharing to achieve the same ends. The world won’t be any safer, but it might be just a bit more silent.

Filed Under: data sharing, egypt, eu, law enforcement, personal information, privacy, turkey

Another Critic Of Egypt's Government Gets Hit With 'Fake News' Charges

from the thanks-trump dept

Fake news is a handy term deployed by authoritarians to criticize speech they don’t like. Since it’s such a malleable term, it’s been co-opted by a handful of foreign governments as the basis for new laws. We don’t have a fake news law here, fortunately, but it’s Trump’s frequent use of the term that has given it worldwide traction.

Egypt’s “fake news” laws comes bundled with lots of other speech-censoring add-ons. Earlier this year, an Egyptian journalist was charged with “spreading false news” and “misuse of a social media account”[!] for exposing state police brutality. The government’s evidence against the journalist included account suspensions by US social media companies quite possibly triggered by takedown requests the government had issued.

Egyptian human rights activist Amal Fathy is the latest victim of the “fake news” law, which was tacked onto a sweeping “cybercrime” bill that gives the Egyptian government more direct control of citizens’ access to internet services.

Here’s how Fathy fell victim to the new cyberlaws:

Last May, Amal Fathy posted a 12-minute video on Facebook in which she described how she had been sexually harassed while visiting her bank.

She also criticised the government for not doing enough to protect women.

She was arrested two days later, and charged with attempting to harm the Egyptian state and possessing indecent material.

Fathy received a two-year suspended sentence and a $560 fine for criticizing her government. Her actions were described by the government as “spreading fake news.” The word “news” apparently also covers opinions, which aligns it with the US President’s deployment of the term.

Fathy won’t be the last person punished for criticizing the Egyptian government. The law is working just the way it was always supposed to, even if it was pitched to residents as something necessary to counter national security threats.

Egypt’s government now has even more power to block internet services and directly oversee any social media accounts with large numbers of followers. Critics of the government aren’t threatening the security of the nation, but the government is willing to overlook the letter of the law to pursue its true, dissent-crushing spirit.

Filed Under: criticism, egypt, fake news, free speech, suppression

Egyptian Gov't Arrests Journalist Who Exposed Brutality; Will Use Social Media Suspensions As Evidence Against Him

from the moderated-right-into-a-prison-sentence dept

As in any country, the limits of free speech are determined by the ruling party. While we have a Constitution that (mostly) holds our representatives at bay, many countries only pay lip service to rights they have previously declared inviolable. Egypt’s government has long suppressed dissent and strangled communications. It deployed an internet kill switch in 2011, cutting off access to millions of Egyptians. A regime change followed and the former president was fined for nuking the country’s internet access.

Despite this power shift, nothing much changed. The current government cares no more for dissent and criticism than the previous one. Egyptian journalist Wael Abbas, who exposed police brutality and government torture, has provided his fellow residents an invaluable service: an unfiltered, ground-level view of government atrocities. His work even resulted in the rare conviction of Cairo police officers.

But he’s fought censorship at home — as well as abroad — every step of the way. YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have all suspended his accounts, supposedly for policy violations. Most of these were reversed after US activists intervened on his behalf, but his accounts are always just another perceived violation away from being shut down permanently.

And that’s just on the US side. Egypt’s government has tried to silence him on the homefront, convicting him in 2010 for “providing telecommunications service to the public without permission of the authorities.” That was under the previous regime — the one that deployed an internet kill switch to disrupt the communications of its many critics and opponents.

The new regime, as noted above, is no better. As Jillian York reports for the EFF, Abbas has been detained by Egyptian police, apparently for the crime of exposing government misdeeds.

Abbas was taken at dawn on May 23 by police to an undisclosed location, according to news reports which quote his lawyer, Gamal Eid. The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) reported that Abbas was not shown a warrant or given a reason for his arrest. He appeared in front of state security yesterday and was questioned and ordered by prosecutors to be held for fifteen days. According to the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression (AFTE), Abbas was charged with “involvement in a terrorist group”, “spreading false news” and “misuse of social networks.”

The details of the charges really don’t matter. Much like “resisting arrest,” the charges are catch-all crimes meant to show the charged the importance of kowtowing to public displays of power. Unfortunately, the prosecution — if it evens needs the help — will be using actions taken by US social media companies as evidence against Abbas.

It seems clear that the messaging around Abbas’ detention is that his arrest was connected to his posts on Facebook and Twitter, and that the prosecution and media are using his suspension by these services as part of the evidence for his guilt.

This is more than merely unfortunate. US social media platforms have played a part in anti-government uprisings around the world. In some cases, platforms have exercised caution when dealing with accounts caught in the middle of government violence, taking extra steps to protect the humans behind pseudonymous accounts. But Abbas has received none of these protections and his documentation of government brutality has resulted in multiple suspensions. The self-proclaimed guardians of worldwide free speech are providing evidence to government censors with their sometimes careless moderation efforts. When you treat certain content as offensive and treat it with blanket moderation policies, you strip the “offensive” content of its context. In cases like this, blanket moderation could mean the difference between freedom and a lengthy prison sentence. If social media platforms want to continue to operate in countries where governments are openly oppressive, they need to do a much better job protecting those who expose government abuse.

Filed Under: arrests, egypt, journalism, social media, wael abbas
Companies: facebook, twitter, youtube

Quixotic Approaches To Circumventing Censorship, Using Books And Music

from the but-not-tilting-at-windmills dept

The topic of censorship crops up far too much here on Techdirt. Less common are stories about how to circumvent it. The two which follow are great examples of how human ingenuity is able to find unexpected ways to tackle this problem. The first story comes from Spain, and concerns a banned book. As the Guardian reports:

Nacho Carretero?s Fariña, an expose of drug trafficking in Galicia, was published in 2015, but publication and sales were halted last month after the former mayor of O Grove in Galicia, Jose Alfredo Bea Gondar, brought legal action against Carretero and his publisher, Libros del KO. Bea Gondar is suing over details in the book about his alleged involvement in drug shipping.

To get around that ban, a new Web site has been created, Finding Fariña, which explains:

A digital tool searches and finds the 80,000 thousand words that make up “Fari?a” within “Don Quijote”, the most universal classic of Spanish literature, and then extracts them, one by one, so that you can read the forbidden story.

Because what they will never be able to censor your rights as a reader. Nor words. And least of all, “Don Quijote”.

The site sifts through the classic Spanish text to find the words that are then recombined to form the forbidden book. You can click on any word in the book’s online text to find the corresponding section of Don Quijote. Since Fariña contains words that did not exist in the early 17th century, when Cervantes wrote his novel, the Web site recreates them from fragments of words that are found within the work. That’s quite important, since it means that Don Quijote can potentially be used to reconstitute any book, if necessary breaking down unusual words into fragments or even single letters. Equally, the same approach could be adopted for banned texts in other languages: all that is needed is some well-known public domain work that can be mined in the same way.

The other approach comes from Germany, but “The Uncensored Playlist,” is being used in China, Egypt, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Vietnam to circumvent censorship in those nations:

While press freedom is not available in the worlds most oppressed societies — global music streaming sites are.

Five acclaimed independent journalists from five countries suffering from strict government censorship teamed up with Musical Director Lucas Mayer to turn 10 articles that had previously been censored into 10 uncensored pop songs. These songs were then uploaded onto freely available music streaming sites. Allowing these stories to be slipped back into the countries where they had once been forbidden.

That is, censored information, written by local journalists, is set to music, and then added to playlists that are available on the main streaming platforms like Spotify, Deezer, and Apple Music. In addition, all the songs are freely available from the project’s Web site, in both the original languages and in English.

Although neither method represents a foolproof anti-circumvention technique, or a serious challenge to the authorities concerned, they do underline that however bad the censorship, there is always a way around it.

Update: The Finding Fariña site has now been censored. So far, there’s no sign of a mirror site being set up outside Spanish jurisdiction, which would seem the obvious response.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: censorship, china, circumvention, egypt, free speech, spain
Companies: spotify

Judge Rules That Egyptian Moral Rights Don't Provide Standing In Tangled Lawsuit Over Jay-Z's Big Pimpin'

from the i-don't-fucking-need-'em dept

For a while now, Jay-Z has been engaged in one of the more bizarre copyright(ish) cases around, concerning his classic song “Big Pimpin'”. The musical hook to that tune — everyone agrees — was from the song “Khosara, Khosara.” But this isn’t a typical copyright case because the song was licensed to Jay-Z back in 1995. So, there shouldn’t be any issue, right? Except that the nephew of the composer of the song claims that the song still violates his uncle’s moral rights. Moral rights, as we’ve discussed for years, are a fairly common concept outside the US, but mostly not valid inside the US (there is a small exception for certain kinds of “visual” arts, which the US put in place solely to pretend it respects the moral rights requirements of the Berne Convention). Nonetheless, Osama Ahmed Fahmy was surprisingly successful in moving forward with a US-based lawsuit against Jay-Z, on behalf of his uncle, the composer Baligh Hamdy.

Fahmy (and other Hamdy relatives) apparently felt offended by what Jay-Z did with the song, which is the classic case for the reason for moral rights (to stop someone, say, for using your song or painting to support the Nazis or whatever). And while it seemed like it should be a simple thing just to have the case thrown out because the US doesn’t recognize moral rights in music, the case still went forward, with Jay-Z even having to testify. Finally, after all that, the judge announced that Fahmy did not have standing to sue Jay-Z. As for why the case even went this far, the judge, Christina Snyder, said she needed to hear from Egyptian law experts first.

Either way, Fahmy’s lawyers have made it clear they’re going to appeal the case, so it’s not over yet, but it seems difficult to see how the case will stand up. A clear license to use the music was granted, throwing in these additional moral rights just seems like yet another example of copyright overreach — but one that the court has, thankfully, rejected.

Filed Under: baligh hamdy, big pimpin', copyright, egypt, jay-z, moral rights, osama fahmy

Egyptian TV News Uses Video Game Footage As Proof Of Russian Precision Strikes Against ISIL

from the game-theory dept

Attention news agencies of Planet Earth. This is an all points bulletin for your benefit: stop passing off video game footage as real-life-happenings. Yes, what seems like a thing that shouldn’t be able to happen has actually happened several times in the past, from video game footage passed off as a terrorist attack to state news agencies passing off video game footage as a potential threat to a nation’s enemies. Some nations appear to even be trying to take advantage of it all, such as when Russia tried to sucker world news groups into thinking that it had found proof that America is arming Ukrainians with video game footage of a weapons cache. And, yet, it keeps happening.

The latest case is an Egyptian news agency bizarrely using footage from a Russian-made video game, Apache: Air Assault, published by Activision and featuring english-speaking characters, to proclaim Russian dominance against ISIS in Syria.

Now, I realize there are cultural and linguistic barriers here, but it shouldn’t be terribly hard to understand that the voices in that footage are speaking English. And, though video games are becoming more realistic by the day, the footage and audio here is still video-game-ish enough that it’s fairly easy to identify it as such with just a few minutes’ watching. And yet, anchor Ahmed Moussa had this to say before airing the footage.

“Yes, this is Russia; this is the Russian army. This is Putin,” he said. “This is the Russian federation. Are they confronting terrorism? Yes, they are. The Americans were too soft on ISIL. The US has been there for a year and a half, and we have seen not one bullet from them, nor have we seen anyone getting killed by them.”

I’ll give Moussa points for originality. After all, it’s not every day you hear lamentations from the Middle East that Americans just aren’t killing enough people.

Filed Under: egypt, footage, isis, news, russia, syria, video games

Cell Phone Kill Switches Are A Slippery Slope For Abusive Governments

from the you're-not-helping dept

Fri, Feb 21st 2014 01:31pm - Karl Bode

Last Spring, wireless carriers and the government jointly announced that they’d be collaborating on building a new nationwide database to track stolen phones (specifically the IMEI number). The goal was to reduce the time that stolen phones remain useful, thereby drying up the market for stolen phones and reducing the ability of criminals to use the devices to dodge surveillance. The move came after AT&T was sued for not doing enough to thwart cellphone theft, the lawsuit alleging AT&T was intentionally lax on anti-theft practices because stolen phone re-activations were too profitable. After regulator pressure, AT&T launched new stolen device blocking tools and re-vamped their website with security tips.

Law enforcement has complained that none of these efforts have done much to stop cell theft and resale, in large part because phones stolen here are simply taken overseas and used there. This in turn prompted a push for new “kill switch” legislation in both New York and most recently San Francisco, in addition to a new bill proposed by Senator Amy Klobuchar we discussed last month. While perhaps well-intentioned, all of the bills have one thing in common: they forget that if you can kill your phone remotely, so then can governments, hackers, and anybody else.

Those concerns are part of the reason cell carriers oppose kill switch legislation (again, that and they profit off of re-activations and new plans), and the worries shouldn’t be taken lightly. There’s a long, long list of examples where remote or artificial termination technology (Monsanto’s wonderful scientific advancements are the first to come to mind) isn’t a particularly great idea. Information Week tries to hash through some of these to illustrate the dangers of the concept and its contribution to a broader surveillance state, where the control over your personal devices could become an illusion and institutionalized control becomes a threat:

“Mandatory phone kill switches will hasten the arrival of the Surveillance of Everything, an unavoidable consequence of the so-called Internet of Things. Using technology to extend the reach of property rights make as much sense for other objects as it does for phones. But in so doing, individual property rights mingle with social mores and government prerogatives. Nothing is truly yours on someone else’s network….Consider a recent Google patent application, “System and Method for Controlling Mobile Device Operation,” which describes research to help in “correcting occasional human error,” such as when phones have not been silenced in a movie theater.

The thing about kill switches is that they’re a manifestation of digital rights management. In the hands of individuals, perhaps they’re a good idea. But they won’t remain in the hands of individuals. They will be used by companies, organizations, and governments, too. And even when people believe they have control of their kill switches, authorities and hackers can be expected to prove otherwise.”

Granted governments could still shut down the BART network on protesters (one of the first examples the author gives) or kill Internet access in Egypt without necessarily needing a kill switch. A gifted hacker might also be able to remotely brick your current phone. But why would you want to make it any easier? There’s countless other ways to combat cell phone theft that doesn’t involve making an entire industry considerably less secure.

Filed Under: bart, egypt, kill switch, wireless
Companies: at&t