The Washington Post reports that the U.S. government has been spying on citizens to collect data for years, but Google recently discovered that a surveillance vendor called Hacking Team sold software to governments with the intention of penetrating Samsung devices.
In the past year in particular, there have been 50 attacks on Samsung devices by “Hacking Team” and their clients. Contractors hacked into targets through text messages and infected Samsung phones with zero-days exploits which allowed them to take “full control” of them through a “backdoor,” according to The Washington Post report.
In addition to this finding, other documents revealed that Google relied on Hacking Team to provide cloud storage for Gmail data. The report from The Washington Post included allegations from a former employee named Eric Rabe who said that he was asked by his superiors at Google to install a surveillance backdoor in Samsung cell phones.
Hacking Team is a firm that was founded in Italy and offers surveillance software for government clients. They have sold their technology to several countries including the U.S. and Germany.
In June 2015, Google bought Hacking Team’s entire assets, including “hundreds of gigabytes of data that law enforcement and intelligence agencies had gathered,” according to the report. It was believed to be a very lucrative buy for Google who paid less than $20 million.
The Post report states that Google provided Hacking Team with various services in order to carry out their surveillance operations including cloud storage, remote access and analytics tools. They also were given some permissions to perform surveillance on their own employees as well as on members of the public via Gmail accounts. Further, they were given permission to hack into people’s cell phones without a warrant or oversight because these are provided through “law enforcement liaison.”
In addition to this, Hacking Team was also allowed to “write and run custom software” on Google infrastructure. The specific reason for writing this code was to create “a new capability to inject test purchases” into Google accounts, according to the report.
The documents revealed that Hacking Team hired a subcontractor in 2015 who had the job of monitoring cell phone traffic social media posts by targets. It is not clear whether or not Google was aware of this operation. In fact, Eric Rabe told The Post that one of their clients used money from a U.S. government agency for development to conduct surveillance on American citizens through Android devices.
The report also specifies that Google is not the only tech giant struggling with privacy issues. It says that in terms of surveillance, Microsoft, Apple and Yahoo have all faced similar challenges involving government requests for data about their services. Google is the one company though who has been “more transparent about what it does.” It may be because of their close relationship with U.S. officials or perhaps because they have acknowledged the fact technology can be used for evil purposes as well as good ones.
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