Mass Surveillance Is Big Business: Corporations Are as Good at Spying as Governments

Data is the currency of surveillance, and it's not just the NSA and GCHQ looking to cash in. As a newly released cache of documents and presentation materials highlights, the private surveillance industry is booming. More shocking is that many firms claim in their own corporate PowerPoints that they've got capabilities that rival that of the government giants.

The document trove, called the Surveillance Industry Index (SII) and released by Privacy International, and contains 1,203 documents from 338 companies in 36 countries, all of which detail surveillance technologies...
 
Of course, that world isn't open to average consumers, which is why SII—and previously, Wikileaks' Spy Files, among others—is eye-opening. What's even more concerning than systems that guarantee "complete data inflow from all networks" is who's buying it. And while all the brochures I've read so far are careful to specify that surveillance tech is only for legal data collection, "legal" is a very fluid term worldwide...

There's a very good reason that the UN High Commissioner called privacy a human right earlier this year: The vast tools available to people with enough money and network access are more capable of accessing private information than ever before...

"There is a culture of impunity permeating across the private surveillance market, given that there are no strict export controls on the sale of this technology, as there on the sale of conventional weapons," Matthew Rice, a research consultant with Privacy International, told The Guardian. (more)