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Dutch MEP Petitions To Ban Export of Surveillance Software

Posted by timothy on from the hey-we're-using-that dept.

Trailrunner7 writes with this excerpt: "A Dutch member of the European parliament is supporting a grass-roots effort to restrict the export of surveillance software such as FinFisher and others, which are used by some governments and law-enforcement agencies to monitor their citizens' activities. The effort, dubbed Stop Digital Arms, is supported by Marietje Schaake, a member of the EU Parliament's International Trade committee. The petition itself is on the Change.org site, and it calls upon members of the European Union 'to give the European Commission the mandate to draft the laws and develop initiatives necessary to stop digital arms trade' ... In a report called 'For Their Eyes Only' released earlier this year, the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the university of Toronto detailed the spread of this software around the world and identified a slew of FinFisher command-and-control servers in countries such as Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, among many others."

3 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Or you could fix the problem by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    and sanction the fuck out of the US until they either revolt and kill their leaders or collapse

  2. Carrier IQ by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Can we add Carrier IQ and other spyware to the list? I'd also like to know how much data NSA got from Carrier IQ and how much Carrier IQ and the telcos that forced it to be installed, got paid by the NSA.

  3. Re:Trololololoooo by stenvar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Explain to me the logic here, because to me it looks like the Europeans are shooting themselves in the foot while screaming "Look what you made me do! Now you'd better stop or I'm gonna do it again!"

    "The Europeans" isn't actually a single group of people with a single agenda. Like "the Americans", it's composed of many different groups. One group, namely European politicians, gets a lot of coverage, and they find it advantageous to inflame anti-American sentiment to (1) get more attention and (2) push through legislation that otherwise wouldn't have much chance to be pushed through.