Report: Hacking Team's 'Illegal' Latin American Empire Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai - Motherboard
go to original April 22, 2016

In a new, exhaustive report on the use and legality of Hacking Team’s spyware in Latin America, the digital rights organization Derechos Digitales details some cases where the spyware was abused, and argues that in general the use of RCS was against the law.

“It’s illegal in the whole region,” Gisela Perez de Acha, a lawyer and public policy analyst at Derechos Digitales, and the author of the report, told Motherboard. “And it’s illegal because [the use of government malware] is not explicitly authorized.”

And even if in some cases there were court orders authorizing it, that doesn’t make it legal, the report concluded.

“OK, there’s a court order. But is this enough in countries with collapsed democratic institutions and judicial powers that are not independent such as Mexico?” Perez de Acha said.

There is also another problem in countries with pervasive corruption, she added. How can you tell who you’re really selling your spyware to?

“In Mexico, the police, the authorities, public officials, and organized crime are the same thing. They work together, they work in collusion, both actively or by omission,” Perez de Acha told me. “Considering this, if you give spyware to the police who makes students disappear, you’re practically giving it to the organized crime.”



For Hacking Team, Latin America was a continent ripe for business. Several government agencies in seven different countries bought RCS at some point in the last few years, and the company negotiated the sale of its spyware in six other countries, practically blanketing the whole continent.

Mexico was by far the best market, with 11 different customers, including the country’s intelligence agency CISEN, the Federal Police, the State Attorney, and five state authorities, according to leaked documents from the company. Through the years, Hacking Team grossed 5.8 million euros in Mexico. (For reference, the second and third best markets were Italy, with a combined 4 million, and Morocco, with 3.1 million euros.)

Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that authorities in Mexico thought they’d need software like Hacking Team’s RCS, with the country’s ongoing and bloody war against drug cartels.

Read the rest at Motherboard | Español

Top illustration: Shaye Anderson

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