On the same day Edward Snowden warned New Zealand residents that they were “being watched” by their government, WikiLeaks published documents showing that police in Australia used powerful spyware to conduct operations.
A new cache released on Monday showed that police departments in New South Wales (NSW) are a client of Gamma International, a German-UK technology company that develops hacking software often used by governments and police. Gamma recently came under fire for providing one of its programs, FinFisher, also known as FinSpy, to oppressive regimes like Bahrain, which used the software to monitor—and occasionally blackmail—Arab Spring activists.
NSW police were one of many law enforcement organizations that FinFisher claimed as clients. Police forces and intelligence agencies from Qatar, South Africa, Pakistan, Nigeria, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Italy, among other countries, also held contracts with the surveillance company.
NSW spent more than $2 million on FinFisher’s programs, some of which enabled police to have near-unlimited access to computer records and allowed them to extract files from hard drives, read emails, and monitor Skype conversations, among other invasive tactics.
Further, police in the region can obtain covert search warrants that allow them to monitor computers remotely. In one chat log between FinFisher support staff and their NSW clients, police asked for the company to create a “categorization feature” that can identify privileged information—such as emails between lawyers and clients—before investigators read it.
“A key logger captures information which is between a lawyer and a known criminal which is not an offense in itself. The captured information needs to be able to be identified as legal privilege and not used in any further intelligence capability as it is considered private,” officers wrote.
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