Australian Simon Gittany murdered his girlfriend, Lisa Harnum, after an abusive relationship that involved his surveillance of her electronic communications using off-the-shelf spyware marketed for purposes ranging from keeping your kids safe to spotting dishonest employees. As Rachel Olding writes in The Age, surveillance technology is increasingly a factor in domestic violence, offering abusive partners new, thoroughgoing ways of invading their spouses' privacy and controlling them.
The spyware industry relies upon computers — laptops, mobile devices, and soon, cars and TVs and thermostats — being insecure. In this, it has the same goals as the NSA and GCHQ, whose BULLRUN/EDGEHILL program sought to weaken the security of widely used operating systems, algorithms and programs. Every weakness created at taxpayer expense was a weakness that spyware vendors could exploit for their products.
Likewise, the entertainment industry wants devices that are capable of running code that users can't terminate or inspect, so that they can stop you from killing the programs that stop you from saving Netflix streams, running unapproved apps, or hooking unapproved devices to your cable box.
And Ratters, the creeps who hijack peoples' webcams in order to spy on them and blackmail them into sexual performances, also want computers that can run code that users can't stop. And so do identity thieves, who want to run keyloggers on your computer to get your banking passwords. And so do cops, who want new powers to insert malware into criminals' computers.
There are a lot of ways to slice the political spectrum — left/right, authoritarian/anti-authoritarian, centralist/decentralist. But increasingly, the 21st century is being defined by the split between people who think your computer should do what you tell it, and people who think that you can't be trusted to control your own computer, and so they should be able to run code on it against your will, without your knowledge, and to your detriment.
Pick a side.
Spyware's role in domestic violence [Rachel Olding/The Age]
(via Geek Feminism)
