Services, monitoring and data exchange
Last year, researchers discovered that one of the most famous and powerful cyberspace surveillance tools is operating in Poland. We are talking about Pegasus spyware (1), developed by the Israeli company NSO Group.
This software allows you to install in many phone models, and then control all the information processed on them - eavesdrop on conversations, read encrypted chats or collect location data. It allows you to control the microphone and camera of the device, making monitoring the surroundings of the smartphone also not a problem. Pegasus provides information about the content of SMS text messages, emails, checking social network activity and viewing documents supported on the phone. Thanks to this, you can also freely change device settings.
To start using it to spy on a victim, malware must be installed on the victim's device. Most often, it is enough to persuade her to follow a special link that will provide installers to the phone without the knowledge of the smartphone owner.
In recent years, Citizen Lab has conducted tests that show that this spyware is currently being used in forty-five countries around the world. More than a thousand IP addresses and domain names are associated with the work of Pegasus. It turned out that the software is active, including in Mexico, the United States, Canada, France and the United Kingdom, as well as in Poland, Switzerland, Hungary and African countries. Although the location may be false due to the use of a VPN application, according to the report, a whole cluster of such devices should have been operating in our country.
The Citizen Lab team estimated that five out of more than thirty active operators were interested in Europe. They operate in Poland, Switzerland, Latvia, Hungary and Croatia. In the case of Poland, an operator named „ORZELBYALI” It appears to only work locally, as of November 2017, this type of spyware may be part of the normal operations of services and law enforcement. In other words, it may simply be a tool used in investigative activities. It is worth noting that in the past there were reports that the Central Bank uses similar tools, and other Polish services were also interested in the products. however, it can also be used for espionage by foreign organizations.
Contrary to the alarmist publications, a wave of which spread after one of the PiS deputies, Tomasz Rzymkowski, “spoke” that such a system is used by the Polish services, and “only persons suspected of committing crimes are the target of operational actions,” is not very suitable for the so-called lot of observation. This is usually a working tool used for tracking and targeting individual specific targets. However, it is worth remembering that the software has already been used many times for transactions that are contrary to local and international laws. Citizen Lab gives examples of governments in countries like Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Togo that have used Pegasus to spy on political opponents.
Smart city "for good" and "for other purposes"
If we want to look for espionage in Poland on a larger scale, we should pay attention to something else that is usually promoted as technological progress - smart city technologies, measures for safety, convenience and saving not only money. Monitoring systems, including with the use, are growing imperceptibly in the largest Polish cities Artificial Intelligence.
Streets, intersections, parks, underpasses and many other places in Łódź are already monitored by several hundred cameras (2). Krakow even sounds beautiful, but behind convenient traffic control, free parking spaces or smart street lights, there is monitoring that monitors more and more aspects of city life. Finding spies in these sorts of decisions can, of course, be controversial, as it is all done "for the good and safety" of the residents. Be aware, however, that smart city systems are labeled around the world by privacy advocates as potentially aggressive and even dangerous if one comes up with the idea of using a "good" system for evil purposes. Many people have such an idea, which we write about in other texts of this issue of MT.
Even Virtualna Warszawa, which has a very noble intention to help blind and visually impaired people move around the city, may end up with some doubts. In essence, this is a smart city project based on the IoT sensor network. For visually impaired people who have trouble getting around, crossing streets, and boarding public transport, the question of whether they are being tracked seems likely to be of secondary importance. However, assurances from city officials that citywide traffic lights remain multifunctional and that Warsaw plans to use the citywide network for other purposes should light a small warning signal.
2. Poster advertising Smart City Expo in Lodz
At the beginning of 2016, the so-called. act of observation. It introduces mechanisms to control the access of services to our personal data, but at the same time allows these services to do much more than before. The volume of data collection via the Internet is now much larger. A company operating in Poland is trying to control the amount of data received. Panopticon Foundation. However, with varying degrees of success. In June of this year, the Homeland Security Agency won a case against the foundation in the Supreme Administrative Court. There has been controversy over the secret service's disclosure of how often it uses the powers granted to it by law.
Surveillance for commercial purposes is of course also known and used in our company. Panoptykon's "Web Tracking and Profiling" report published in February this year. How you turn from a customer into a product” shows how our data is already being used in a market that we most often don’t even know exists.
There, Internet content providers sell the profiles of their users and the advertising spaces displayed to them through so-called supply platforms (). Data from the sellers of advertising space is received and analyzed by the so-called demand platforms (). They are designed to search for users with a specific profile. Wanted user profiles are defined media agencies. In turn, the task advertising exchanges () - optimal ad fit for the user who should see it. This data market is already functioning in Poland, as well as in many other countries of the world.
