Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
The global spyware and digital forensics industry is equipping democratic and authoritarian governments with advanced intrusive capabilities. Now, more information about this opaque industry is coming to light following an array of surveillance scandals.
We’ve created an interactive graph that identifies the key vendors and clients in the spyware industry, highlighting relationships between governments and suppliers of intrusion software. Explore these relationships and how regimes are using intrusion technology by selecting a country or vendor below.
Steven Feldstein and Brian Kot
The dataset focuses on three overarching questions: Which governments show evidence of procuring and using commercial spyware? Which private sector companies are involved and what are their countries of origin? What activities have governments used the technology for?
Source material derives from the Citizen Lab, Freedom House, Privacy International, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Cyber Operations Tracker, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Article 19, Access Now, and an assortment of related research organizations. The inventory also includes data from major print and news media outlets (such as the New York Times, Reuters, Haaretz, the Financial Times, theWall Street Journal). The inventory focuses on incidents occurring between 2011 and 2023.
Spyware and digital forensics technologies are being used for political repression around the world. Democratic governments are some of the worst offenders.
An Israeli company has sold military-grade surveillance spyware to governments that are using it to spy on private citizens. What can the United States do about the explosion of such snooping?