According to Freedom House,governments in various countries are rapidly investing in sophisticated technologies to track their citizens’ social media use. Previously the domain of the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies, this sort of mass surveillance has spread to a variety of countries, ranging from big authoritarian powers to smaller or poorer ones hoping to seek down dissidents and persecuted minorities.
The expanding use of social media surveillance, along with an alarming increase in the number of nations where social media users have been arrested for their lawful online activity, threatens to limit the space for civic activism on digital platforms.
Artificial intelligence (AI) advancements have brought up new potential for mass surveillance. Advanced monitoring systems can use link analysis to swiftly map individuals’ relationships, ascribe a meaning or attitude to their social media posts using natural-language processing and sentiment analysis, and infer their past, present, or future locations.
Spyware can be placed on any device, including a computer, a tablet, an iPhone, or an Android phone. Spyware makers used to target computers, but now they target Android phones, iPhones, and tablets.
NSO Group, an Israeli “Cyber Warfare” company, makes and sells Pegasus, a mobile phone spyware .Candiru is also a top-secret Israeli firm that offers spyware to governments only. To monitor a target, a Pegasus government operator must persuade the target to click on a specially designed exploit link, which, once clicked, launches a chain of zero-day vulnerabilities that compromise the phone’s security features and install Pegasus without the user’s knowledge or permission.
According to a report published by Toronto-based research center Citizen Lab,Pegasus begins contacting the operator’s command and control (C&C) servers to receive and execute operators’ commands, as well as send back the target’s private data, such as passwords, contact lists, calendar events, text messages, and live voice calls from popular mobile messaging apps, once the phone has been exploited and Pegasus has been installed. The operator can even activate the phone’s camera and microphone to record what’s going on around it.
Amnesty International alleged that journalists, bloggers, and activists who speak out against oppression are frequently targeted. They could be exposing shady deals, seeking election reform, or advocating for privacy rights. They are at odds with their governments because they defend human rights. Governments would rather shut them down than listen to them.
NSO claims to be developing technology to assist governments in combating terrorism and crime.To gain access to users’ phones and computers, the authorities employ sophisticated cyber-attacks. They can find out who their contacts are, their passwords, their social media activities, and their texts once they’ve gained access. They have the ability to record talks.
The phones of 37 journalists and human rights activists were either attempted or successfully hacked by an Israeli surveillance firm, and were infected with military-grade malware, according to a Washington Post and 16 media partners investigation.The spyware used in the attacks came from NSO,according to media reports. NSO Group grants use licences to government agencies for the purpose of tracking criminals and terrorists.
But the inquiry revealed that two of the 37 compromised devices belonged to two women close to Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi writer who was brutally murdered and his body dismembered in the Saudi embassy in Turkey after falling out of favour with the Saudi royal family.It’s also making headlines that it was also used to hack Indian journalists, Opposition leaders,social activists.Journalists and lawyers who have been critical of President Enrique Pena Nieto’s administration had previously been targeted.
Mexico’s opposition party was the target of government spyware.
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