Biden Outlaws Government use of Commercial Spyware

­The Biden administration has taken the step of prohibiting commercial spyware use by federal agencies.

Though, for many of these spyware developers, their prime (or only) clientele is state and federal governments, so Biden is effectively crippling the industry.

Your average person probably assumes spyware is the exclusive domain of hackers and cyber criminals, but governments have long used it to spy on their own citizens.

In one famous case, the Israeli firm NSO Group has sold military-grade surveillance spyware to governments for the purpose of surveillance. But it goes far beyond that.

A Washington Post investigative series called the Pegasus Project has shed some light on this federal use of spyware.

According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 50,000 phone numbers appear on a surveillance hacking list which includes business executives, human rights activists, journalists, politicians, and government officials from at least fifty countries.

In some cases, the targets were criminals and terrorists, and the surveillance was a prelude to assassination. But it seems that a huge percentage were ordinary citizens.

While NSO Group pays lip service to the idea that “we must hold ourselves to a higher standard…taking into consideration the need for the sensitive balance between states’ obligations to ensure public safety and concern for human rights and privacy,” they’re also pretty clearly ignoring all evidence to the contrary.

They insist that their products “must only be directed by their operators at legitimate criminal or terror group targets,” when it’s clearly being used by governments against their own people, criminal or otherwise.

Biden’s executive order is a minor, but necessary, step towards curtailing the surveillance state.