Amnesty International Releases Tool To Combat Government Spyware

New submitter Gordon_Shure_DOT_com writes Human rights charity Amnesty International has released Detekt, a tool that finds and removes known government spyware programs. Describing the free software as the first of its kind, Amnesty commissioned the tool from prominent German computer security researcher and open source advocate Claudio Guarnieri, aka 'nex'. While acknowledging that the only sure way to prevent government surveillance of huge dragnets of individuals is legislation, Marek Marczynski of Amnesty nevertheless called the tool (downloadable here) a useful countermeasure versus spooks. According to the app's instructions, it operates similarly to popular malware or virus removal suites, though systems must be disconnected from the Internet prior to it scanning.

Comments

Sure way to make the government block their site?

[Kergan]

Wouldn't the target government's obvious reaction be to block Amnesty International's site? Or worse, to masquerade as their site in order to distribute spyware?

Don't bother.

[mmell]

If you're interesting enough that the NSA is watching what you do on your computer, the NSA is already watching what you do on your computer. Now that you have detected this, other (possibly less subtle) methods will be used to ensure that you are appropriately monitored . . . but kudos to you for catching the NSA! X^D

Oh, and First Post!

Re:Don't bother.

[Anonymous Coward]

The NSA is watching whether you're interesting or not.

Apparently you didn't get the memo...

Re:Don't bother.

[RabidReindeer]

The problem is, since they're using statistical methods, you can become "interesting" without actually being interesting. Which is precisely why people need to be involved at all levels, not merely from some dark lair at the top.

v1.1

[TFlan91]

Seems to be a fast dev cycle.

v1.1 released 12 hours after v1

https://github.com/botherder/d...

ROTFL

[sribe]

... the only sure way to prevent governments surveillance of huge dragnets of individuals is legislation...

What, they really believe that will work???

Re:Amnesty International

[Guy Harris]

Amnesty International has a terrible track record of attacking Western Democracies disproportionately more so than Dictatorships. I guess they like picking on easy targets, instead of actually trying to make a difference. When is the last time we heard them lobby government action in Africa or the Middle-East?

You mean like this, for Syria, or this, for Iraq, and archived campaigns such as this, for South Sudan, and this, for the Central African Republic?

Bug #1 for this software makes it pretty useless.

[supernaut]

This software does not support Windows 8 or 8.1 x64.

This makes it kind of useless for a whole swath of people like journalists, human rights defenders, etc who have purchased a new Windows machine in the last year or so can't use it.

Brilliant Social Engineering!

[INT_QRK]

So, how can you be sure that "click here" in TFA doesn't itself download malware disguised as malware detection? If I were a black-hat govy who wanted to root out people worried about government malware, I might use such a ruse. Think about it.

Re:Amnesty International

[HairyNevus]

Amnesty International was founded in London in 1961 . I have no idea what that that paragraph was from, Googling bits and pieces of it and "Amnesty International 1954" yielded nothing. But given how long an nonsensical that last sentence was, I'm guessing you're just manufacturing bullshit.

Re:Closed source executable

[RGuns]

Umm, it's released under the GPL. So not closed source at all.

Says my version of windows is unsupported

[Mistakill]

Using Windows 8.1 Update 1, fully patched.... *facedesk*