Dutch MEP Petitions To Ban Export of Surveillance Software 81
Trailrunner7 writes with this excerpt: "A Dutch member of the European parliament is supporting a grass-roots effort to restrict the export of surveillance software such as FinFisher and others, which are used by some governments and law-enforcement agencies to monitor their citizens' activities. The effort, dubbed Stop Digital Arms, is supported by Marietje Schaake, a member of the EU Parliament's International Trade committee. The petition itself is on the Change.org site, and it calls upon members of the European Union 'to give the European Commission the mandate to draft the laws and develop initiatives necessary to stop digital arms trade' ... In a report called 'For Their Eyes Only' released earlier this year, the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the university of Toronto detailed the spread of this software around the world and identified a slew of FinFisher command-and-control servers in countries such as Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, among many others."
Very slippery slope... (Score:4, Insightful)
Be careful such a well-intentioned ban doesn't backfire.
Instead of banning software, how about reacting to what people DO with software?
Re:I think it would be better (Score:5, Insightful)
if they didn't ban just export but import as well.
Great idea. The Dutch don't need Wireshark anyway.
Oh, wait, you mean "monitoring software" means software that can monitor traffic on the network?
How about jailing the people who actually abuse the tools to violate other people's rights, instead of trying to outlaw them?
Stop Digital Arms (Score:4, Insightful)
By all means, let's drive it underground... and make it all classified..
Anything can be used as a weapon (Score:5, Insightful)
Others have said similar things already, but this will never work. Any tool that can be used to do something useful, can be used to harm someone else. That is true for most tools we humans use and also applies to most "cyber tools". Using a network scanner to find intruders or bad configured systems is good, using it to find someone that wants to get information out of a censored government is bad. Using a load tester to see if your system can handle the users it's designed for is good, but using it to take down some system that is run by someone you oppose of is bad.
She has no idea that the tools exclusively marketed as cyber weapons are nothing more than window dressing for existing things. Any government spending money on this either needs the window dressing and can't make their own, or is too stupid to understand this sort of thing. The more they spend money on cyber weapons, the less they will spend it on potentially more harmful things. Please let them be, it's a snake oil market and anyone buying the snake oil deserves what they get for their money.
Re:I think it would be better (Score:3, Insightful)
It would be more like a weapons export ban, where you are not allowed to export them to countries that are known to abuse them. In other words no selling telecom monitoring equipment to governments that then use it to oppress their citizens, like certain middle eastern countries or the US/UK.