[1] http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/government-it/nsw-police-use-ha...
I personally have no qualms with the FBI planting malware as just another form of surveillance (if they have a warrant to search your home and tap your phone, why shouldn't they be able to get a warrant to monitor your computer?). The problem with Gamma Group, and what I suspect is one of the core reasons for this leak, is that they happily sell their product to extremely oppressive regimes and give them personal support, knowing full well that the tools are being used to spy on and find dissidents, protesters, and political opponents.
Is the US/Australia/Uk's treatment of Julian Assange (as an example) not count as "oppressive regimes" and "...dissidents, protesters, and political opponents."?
How is that different to <insert country you were thinking of when you wrote "oppressive regimes"> ? (I ask honestly, not rhetorically)
I'm not claiming that everything is perfect in those western countries, but compared to them there are some truly evil regimes around in countries where absolutely no checks and balances exists to rein abuse in.
While this may get me down-voted into oblivion, since the author may be easily one of the most hated people in the tech world, I recommend Evgeny Morozovs "The Net Delusion" which is a quite insightful take on the abuse of tech by oppressive regimes.
The US treats certain people very unethically, including Assange, but in these cases it's more a sense of vengeance for having our top secret dirty laundry aired, compared to simply disagreeing with or disliking the government. We still have a long way to go to, but the freedom to express yourself is simply a lot higher in most Western European and North American countries.
You're an idiot.
If you take a look at the actual licensing by countries, you will see my suspicions are indeed confirmed. The support tickets issued by Australian law enforcement, for example, mention that use is only permitted through warrants and even specifically states their reporting and documentation requirements.
>Our Warrants authorize the use of the the FF intrusion capability as well as the individual modules that are used. At the conclusion of a warrant there is a requirement that a report is made on every date / time each module captures information. For example, if a key logger captures data at 1pm 2/1/2013 we need to report this to our legal system. This time/date is important for reporting procedures as there is a requirement to record every instance a module is used. Is there some way of just extracting the time/date and module name to a report?
This does not constitute unethical use of this software. This is simply a way of placing a "wire tap" on a computing device.