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Article

27 Jul 2015

Author:
Dennis Fisher, Threatpost

The Hacking Team says it "has always sold strictly within the law"

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'Hacking Team Claims It Always Sold "Strictly Within the Law", 22 July 2015

Hacking Team officials are disputing reports that the company sold its surveillance and intrusion software to oppressive regimes in countries that were under sanction. The company said it sold its products “strictly within the law and regulation as it applied at the time any sale was made.” The new statement from Hacking Team comes after two weeks of stories resulting from the compromise of the company’s network earlier this month...Some of the more damaging information to emerge from the cache includes documents showing the company sold its surveillance tools to government agencies in Ethiopia, Syria, Sudan, and other oppressive countries. Hacking Team executives have now admitted to selling to these countries, but say that when Hacking Team sold to them, the sales were legal. “The company has always sold strictly within the law and regulation as it applied at the time any sale was made. That is true of reported sales to Ethiopia, Sudan, Russia, South Korea and all other countries,” a statement from the company...says. A report from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto last year exposed the way that the Ethiopian government used Hacking Team’s RCS platform to target some Ethiopian journalists, among others. The company said it stopped selling to Ethiopia after the information was revealed...Hacking Team now says that, regardless of controversy, the company’s sales were all within the law, even its sale to Sudan in 2012. Sudan has been under United States sanctions for 10 years, including bans on the sale of arms.

 

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