While the Mexican government has long been suspected of purchasing surveillance equipment, the frequency of these purchases and the level of public funds allocated to them are rapidly increasing. Last February,  New York Times published an investigative report on a USD 355 million outlay by the Mexican Ministry of Defense for sophisticated surveillance equipment. Six months earlier, Carmen Artistegui, a renowned investigative journalist in Mexico, published a report documenting five contracts from the Secretariat of National Defense for the purchase of surveillance technologies. All five contracts were confidential and granted to a single company headquartered in the state of Jalisco called Security Tracking Devices, Inc.

Cyber Steward Network partner Renata Avila details her efforts to bring legal action against FinFisher in Mexico.

Cyber Steward partner Bytes for All (B4A) has launched “Access Is My Right” — an advocacy campaign to engage Pakistani citizens on Internet censorship, privacy, and freedom of expression in the country. The campaign calls on citizens to raise awareness of information controls by sharing campaign visuals across the Internet, especially on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook.

Recent research from The Citizen Lab has detected the presence of devices capable of surveillance on networks operated by Nigerian Internet service providers. In January 2013, Citizen Lab researchers found installations of Blue Coat Systems’ PacketShaper device on netblocks associated with IPNX ISP and Cobranet. In April 2013, Citizen Lab released “For Their Eyes Only: The Commercialization of Digital Spying,” in which researchers identified FinFisher servers on a network operated by Suburban Telecom.

On May 13, 2013, Bytes for All (B4A), a Pakistani civil society group and partner in the Cyber Stewards Network, filed a petition with the Lahore High Court on the possible use of the FinFisher product suite in Pakistan. B4A has advocated for the rights of Pakistani netizens to browse the Internet free of censorship and surveillance through numerous court and government actions, including a recent petition submitted in January 2013 in protest of the ongoing censorship of YouTube.

Citizen Lab is pleased to announce the release of “For Their Eyes Only: The Commercialization of Digital Spying.”  The report features new findings, as well as consolidating a year of our research on the commercial market for offensive computer network intrusion capabilities developed by Western companies.

Privacy International have filed an application for judicial review of HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) refusal to release information about the potentially unlawful export of Gamma International’s FinFisher surveillance technology.

Citizen Lab Director Ron Deibert and Senior Researcher Sarah McKune wrote an op-ed on the digital arms trade in the 13 March edition of the Ottawa Citizen.

This post describes the results of a comprehensive global Internet scan for the command and control servers of FinFisher’s surveillance software. It also details the discovery of a campaign using FinFisher in Ethiopia that may have been used to target individuals linked to an opposition group. Additionally, it provides examination of a FinSpy Mobile sample found in the wild, which appears to have been used in Vietnam.

This report, written and coordinated by Citizen Lab Technical Advisor Morgan Marquis-Boire, analyzes several samples we believe to be mobile variants of the FinFisher Spy Kit targeting iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Symbian platforms. It is a follow-on to a previous research brief, From Bahrain with Love: FinFisher's Spy Kit Exposed?, that analyzed several pieces of malware targeting Bahraini dissidents.