
Middle East Dictators Buy Spy Tech from Company Linked to IBM and Google - notlukesky
https://theintercept.com/2019/07/12/semptian-surveillance-mena-openpower/
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jsty
> The Chinese firm is a member of an American organization called the
> OpenPower Foundation, which was founded by Google and IBM executives with
> the aim of trying to “drive innovation.”

So the link is all three happen to be members of an open consortium? That has
to be one of the most tenuous 'links' imaginable, on par with "have employees
who attended the same conference once".

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yorwba
OpenPower is such a nice ominous name that the writer conveniently avoided
explaining that it refers to the instruction set architecture descended from
PowerPC (although that means they missed a chance to also "link" them to
Apple).

I doubt that the particular instruction set architecture used by those chips
has a large influence on their use for surveillance applications. In a few
years, we'll probably get to read similar articles about RISC-V, complete with
"risky" puns.

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vuln
The Falcon tool sounds very similar to the stingray device manufactured by
Harris Corporation. The same company that strong armed law enforcement with
NDAs on the tools itself and releasing any information about how the law
enforcement officers actually gathered the evidence.

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180120/06352239048/harri...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180120/06352239048/harris-
stingray-nondisclosure-agreement-forbids-cops-telling-legislators-about-
surveillance-tech.shtml)

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quaquaqua1
Saudi Interior Ministry (secret police) buy a ton of Oracle/SUN as well.

The Saudis have deep pockets and Oracle us very happy to aid them in human
rights violations

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badrabbit
Would be nice if default apps and settings in purism's phone use end to end
encryption for reasons like this.

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resters
This is not unusual behavior for firms that are defense contractors.

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buboard
They wanted tried and tested solutions.

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sverige
>Aegis, Semptian’s flagship system, is designed to be installed inside phone
and internet networks, where it is used to secretly collect people’s email
records, phone calls, text messages, cellphone locations, and web browsing
histories.

Other than government involvement, how is this different than the capabilities
deployed by Google and the permissions granted various apps in their store?

