"Hacking Team Leaks Confirm What Arab Privacy Advocates Already Knew", 3 August 2015

For several years now, privacy advocates in the Middle East and North Africa have grappled with the impact of targeted surveillance technologies on various communities in their countries. These tools, sold by unscrupulous European companies to some of the world’s least democratic governments, have been increasingly used to spy on activists, often without any legal mandate...While the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab had previously unearthed the sale of Hacking Team tools to some countries in the region, the leaks showed that the company’s reach is farther than previously imagined: Lebanon, Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt, Oman, Bahrain, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates have all emerged as clients of Hacking Team at one time or another...