Marketing materials document the shady world of government surveillance products
The Wall Street Journal has collected some 200-odd pages of marketing literature for products in the surveillance industry — a business that it notes has gone from table scraps to $5 billion in revenue annually in the decade since the 9/11 attacks. Whereas governments around the world used to develop and deploy spy technology internally, they're turning more and more to third parties — private companies — for tools used to infiltrate the internet and peek into private communications, and the WSJ's archive offers a fascinating (and often scary) look at the capabilities these companies are advertising. From password bypass to decryption, seemingly nothing is off the table, and many of the products advertise malware-like vectors for their customers (governments, that is) to take advantage of. Naturally, many of these vectors are the same ones that vendors like Microsoft and Apple are constantly working to close, which makes for a terribly high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse — and users' privacy is at stake.

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