Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation profiled FinFisher and Amesys, two of the companies that had been caught selling network spying tools to despotic regimes around the world, including Hosni Mubarak's Egypt and Muammar Qaddafi's Libya. This week, EFF continues the series with profiles of Italy's Area SpA (which sells electronic tracking software to Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria) and Germany's Trovicor (which sells spyware to a dozen countries in the Middle East and North Africa).
In 2011, at the same time that news of Syria's violent crackdown on democratic protests graced the pages of the world's newspapers, an Italian company called Area SpA was busy helping the Syrian's dictator Bashar al-Assad electronically track the dissidents his army was firing upon in the streets. Area SpA had begun installing "monitoring centers" that would give the Syrian government the ability "to intercept, scan and catalog virtually every e-mail that flows through the country" as well as "follow targets on flat-screen workstations that display communications and Web use in near-real time alongside graphics that map citizens' networks of electronic contacts."
Worse, as the violence in Syria escalated in mid-2011, "Area employees [were] flown into Damascus in shifts" in the government's push to finish the project, according to a report from Bloomberg News.
Spy Tech Companies & Their Authoritarian Customers, Part II: Trovicor and Area SpA
