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British Companies Are Selling Advanced Spy Tech To Authoritarian Regimes (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Since early 2015, over a dozen UK companies have been granted licenses to export powerful telecommunications interception technology to countries around the world, Motherboard has learned. Many of these exports include IMSI-catchers, devices which can monitor large numbers of mobile phones over broad areas. Some of the UK companies were given permission to export their products to authoritarian states such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, and Egypt; countries with poor human rights records that have been well-documented to abuse surveillance technology. In 2015, the UK's Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) started publishing basic data about the exportation of telecommunications interception devices. Through the Freedom of Information Act, Motherboard obtained the names of companies that have applied for exportation licenses, as well as details on the technologies being shipped, including, in some cases, individual product names. The companies include a subsidiary of defense giant BAE Systems, as well as Pro-Solve International, ComsTrac, CellXion, Cobham, and Domo Tactical Communications (DTC). Many of these companies sell IMSI-catchers. IMSI-catchers, sometimes known as "Stingrays" after a particularly popular brand, are fake cell phone towers which force devices in their proximity to connect. In the data obtained by Motherboard, 33 licenses are explicitly marked as being for IMSI-catchers, including for export to Turkey and Indonesia. Other listings heavily suggest the export of IMSI-catchers too: one granted application to export to Iraq is for a "Wideband Passive GSM Monitoring System," which is a more technical description of what many IMSI-catchers do. In all, Motherboard received entries for 148 export license applications, from February 2015 to April 2016. A small number of the named companies do not provide interception capabilities, but defensive measures, for example to monitor the radio spectrum.
If you are free to question and ridicule the government, they you do not live in an authoritarian country.
That's a ridiculously simplistic view of authoritarianism.
The ideal authoritarian government would allow anyone to say anything, as long as nothing the say puts the government at risk.
IOW, everyone would be closely monitored with sufficient laws that everyone has been established guilty of something. Then, if anyone's rabble-rousing becomes too effective, you can take them away.
Everyon feels free, but nobody is free.
That's essentially the brand of authoritarianism that British Home Secretary Theresa May has been pushing to implement the infrastructure for.
She is now Prime Minister, having just pushed the Investigatory Powers Act through the Commons and beginning the process of removing legal obligations under the Human Rights Act. This last Act brings the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, and - contrary to its name - has nothing to do with the EU, but was proposed by Churchill and framed mostly by British lawyers, and is the nearest we have to a written constitution (our unwritten constitution is more about procedure than substantive law).
Try carrying a large amount of cash on you. If you get stopped by the cops, it'll be confiscated and you'll have to prove your innocence.
You can be imprisoned for using drugs recreationally, even though you didn't harm anyone in the process.
Some people have their constitutional rights removed from them, sometimes permanently, even after their prison sentence has ended and they are deemed "free".
Stop kidding yourself. All nations today exhibit varying degrees of authoritarian regimes. Just because you haven't found yourself on the wrong side of justice yet, doesn't mean its all smiles and sunshine.
Why the fuck would the NSA want to listen to you?
For the same reason they do every night, Pinky - We're trying to take over the world!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”