PARIS: European companies sold powerful spyware to authoritarian regimes which have used it against dissenters, a group of investigative media said on Thursday.
According to the probe -- by European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) and spearheaded by the French site Mediapart and Germany´s Der Spiegel weekly -- European companies “supplied dictators cyber-surveillance tools for more than a decade”, EIC said in a statement.
“During the last decade the Western world has encouraged and applauded the digital tools that empower democracy activism in countries under authoritarian regimes,” it said. “But at the same time European companies have supplied such authoritarian regimes the digital back doors to turn any digital device into powerful spying tools against dissenters,” it said.
The Predator Files investigation, named after the software, said the sellers benefited from “the passive complicity of many European governments”. The investigation focused on the Intellexa Alliance, a group of companies through which EIC said Predator software had been supplied to authoritarian states.
Intellaxa is run by former Israeli intelligence officials mostly based in Europe, and was targeted by US sanctions in July. Mediapart said the spyware had also been sold to Qatar, Congo Brazzaville, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan “under the complacent eyes of the French secret services”.
