Amnesty International Releases Tool To Combat Government Spyware 95
New submitter Gordon_Shure_DOT_com writes Human rights charity Amnesty International has released Detekt, a tool that finds and removes known government spyware programs. Describing the free software as the first of its kind, Amnesty commissioned the tool from prominent German computer security researcher and open source advocate Claudio Guarnieri, aka 'nex'. While acknowledging that the only sure way to prevent government surveillance of huge dragnets of individuals is legislation, Marek Marczynski of Amnesty nevertheless called the tool (downloadable here) a useful countermeasure versus spooks. According to the app's instructions, it operates similarly to popular malware or virus removal suites, though systems must be disconnected from the Internet prior to it scanning.
This will last five minutes (Score:1)
"the only sure way to prevent governments surveillance of huge dragnets of individuals is legislation"
Ha, you seriously think that's going to stop them?
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And does it work against putative Nigerian royalty?
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Sure way to make the government block their site? (Score:3)
Wouldn't the target government's obvious reaction be to block Amnesty International's site? Or worse, to masquerade as their site in order to distribute spyware?
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Yeah, or this entire announcement is just cover for a program like the fake vaccines in Abottabad.
Also, this: "the only sure way to prevent governments surveillance of huge dragnets of individuals is legislation".
Can anyone explain to me how legislation would prevent government surveillance? I don't get it. If the Constitution isn't enough, why would a law be? Maybe because laws are how dollars get spent?
Meh (Score:1)
Shame it doesn't work on Windows 8.1....
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Shame it doesn't work on Windows 8.1....
And the build dependencies gave me a lot of trouble when I tried to install it; the recommended packages don't work with one another, the extra python tools didn't even recognise that python was installed.
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The NSA is watching whether you're interesting or not.
Apparently you didn't get the memo...
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The NSA is watching whether you're interesting or not.
No, they are just putting you in a ringbuffer, like every time I visit slashdot I go into their logs. They are just recording you, like those dashboard cams. Those only become interesting if something interesting happens, like a car crash. Otherwise, no one looks at these dashcam recordings and they just get overwritten every few hours.
In case of NSA, this is a huge waste of resources. Recording everyone requires hundreds of billions of dollars in resources and it's only useful how much? To catch some small
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The problem is, since they're using statistical methods, you can become "interesting" without actually being interesting. Which is precisely why people need to be involved at all levels, not merely from some dark lair at the top.
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Fair enough. But if you think you are interesting enough for the NSA to be watching you (so much so that you download and use this tool) you may have just done enough to make you interesting enough for NSA to watch you.
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This is still useful as a defence against the FBI and other corrupt law enforcement agencies who might attack you. They don't have the resources that the NSA does, and have to be careful about what they reveal in court as evidence against you.
Even the NSA is powerful, but not magical. They watch everyone, but if you take some steps to block them you can opt out of much of the mass surveillance. If they target you more specifically, you can still block most if not all their spying until it gets to the point
Hello, I am calling you from Amnesty International (Score:1)
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I think that comment is bashing scam artists, not the particular organization. Unfortunately, a lot of people would be clueless enough to fall for that type of phone call.
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Hi, is that Dave in Bangalore? That software you sold me isn't working as expected, in fact the mouse cursor seems to have taken on a life of its own and gone hunting for bear porn.
v1.1 (Score:2)
Seems to be a fast dev cycle.
v1.1 released 12 hours after v1
https://github.com/botherder/d... [github.com]
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The NSA probably infected them with a new threat during that time period, and they had to update the target definitions to protect against it.
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I guess the spyware it detects only runs on Windows platforms. Would be nice, though, to be able to do an offline scan of a windows system from a bootable usb, or linux cd.
My thoughts exactly.
The win32 binary will not run with WINE. I get a segfault.
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Runs in WINE for me. ("wine-1.7.31") Not an issue.
Naturally, it didn't find any spyware. :)
Re:Amnesty International (Score:5, Informative)
Amnesty International has a terrible track record of attacking Western Democracies disproportionately more so than Dictatorships. I guess they like picking on easy targets, instead of actually trying to make a difference. When is the last time we heard them lobby government action in Africa or the Middle-East?
You mean like this, for Syria [amnesty.org], or this, for Iraq [amnesty.org], and archived campaigns such as this, for South Sudan [amnesty.org], and this, for the Central African Republic [amnesty.org]?
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"Alec saw the battle lines redrawn with stark clarity, with the victims of capitalist and imperialist oppression all over the world on one side, and the United States and its allies, including Spain, on the other. Given such a contest, he realised that to undertake the defence of the Spanish freemasons had been timely as well as symbolically correct because it opened
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I can see why you might not to have wanted to post a link to that. The first one I found was a right wing rag, so now I'm wondering who's farting into the wind here. Then I find the original article [quadrant.org.au] (pdf, pg 11) at another right wing rag...
As they say, Nice try [wikipedia.org] :-)
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Sorry, forgot the first link [blogspot.mx]...
ROTFL (Score:3)
... the only sure way to prevent governments surveillance of huge dragnets of individuals is legislation...
What, they really believe that will work???
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It's all well and good to hand-wave about what the constitution does, but the literal constitution does not directly address the issue. It must be interpreted and the interpretation is then applied. Interpretation is where legislation becomes necessary.
You're an insufferable fool. The spirit and the wording of the 4th amendment both clearly prohibit mass surveillance.
The 4th says you are secure in your person, papers, and effects. Why would it say "paper"? To literally protect your paper? No, to protect the information on the paper. What is the NSA collecting? Nearly everyone's information, even if they're not suspects of any sort and the government doesn't have a warrant.
And do you really believe that the founders would have allowed the government to con
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It can certainly make life difficult for them. The recent revelations that GCHQ spied on the privileged conversations between suspects and their lawyers only came out because they were dragged in to court. It's not perfect but it's a useful weapon.
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Amnesty are tools (Score:1)
Amnesty don't care about the fact that children are being trafficked by the British State under colour of Law.
Amnesty don't care about the fact that the BBC not only covered up the fact that one of their most highly-paid employees was a paedophile, they ran the coverup for over fifty YEARS, they also ENABLED him by procuring children.
Amnesty don't care about the fact that prominent members of Parliament, including inner Cabinet members, have been publicly implicated in child sexual abuse rings, child disapp
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Is there some part of that's not what they are there for you don't get, fuck me what a morn.
MS-Windows (Score:2)
Shouldn't this article be tagged "MS-Windows"? The download is an .exe file (which is exactly what I expected)
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I ran it in a virtual Win7 machine and it displayed a splash screen and just sat there like that for hours until I killed it.
How is this any better than, say, ComboFix,exe? http://www.bleepingcomputer.co... [bleepingcomputer.com]
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A/C? Are you kidding? It's 2 degrees and snowing here, they've got the heat shut down this afternoon while they're flushing the radiators, and I've got my space heater going. Why do they not do this in, say, August?
Bug #1 for this software makes it pretty useless. (Score:2)
This software does not support Windows 8 or 8.1 x64.
This makes it kind of useless for a whole swath of people like journalists, human rights defenders, etc who have purchased a new Windows machine in the last year or so can't use it.
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€10 says this is because you can't build 64-bit binaries with the free version of MSVS.
Brilliant Social Engineering! (Score:3)
declared terrorists in... (Score:1)
Amnesty International added to the list of terrorist organizations in 3... 2... 1...
Closed source executable (Score:2)
A single closed-source executable from a German organization claiming to have the support of Amnesty International.
Seems legit.
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Says my version of windows is unsupported (Score:3)
Taxpayer-funded malware. *facepalm* (Score:1)
I love my government. -_-
From NGO to no-go? (Score:1)