People have been increasingly more worried about their governments spying on them and Amnesty International, a non-profit organization, has launched an app to combat that. More and more countries, including South Korea, the U.S., China and Russia are being accused of monitoring and spying on their citizens through technology. Snowden and Assange are two of the biggest figures to expose these efforts of governments, but not much has changed. Amnesty has launched Detekt, an app that would help tech enthusiasts shield themselves from the prying eyes of their governments.
Amnesty International alongside Privacy International, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Digitale Gesellschaft have begun working together to launch Detekt, a tool that would help spyware and malware from government agencies infecting the devices of the unaware. Detekt is designed for devices running Microsoft Windows and should be able to detect the presence of spyware on the systems, alerting users immediately. Developers of Detekt say that there are more countries spying on their citizens than not, and malware is their main means of getting into otherwise private networks and gadgets.
Governments use spyware to spy on activists and people that criticize their country most, according to Amnesty International. The organization says that government surveillance has become widespread and many of us are being spied on without us even realizing it. Amnesty International says that governments can pull e-mails, files, entire Skype conversations as well as photos and videos from any computer they can manage to infect with their software. They also say that a certain program has been widely used by European and Asian governments, called FinFisher, which can even take screenshots of you activity.
While Detekt isn’t very different from other anti-spyware and anti-malware programs, it shows that people are starting to be more aware of their privacy and security being breached by those who had vowed to protect them. Through Detekt, Amnesty International aims to raise awareness about government spying and the illegal nature of the evidence authorities may gather through this activity. Even though there are tons of laws protecting the privacy of most countries’ citizens, spying software can be easily concealed. Amnesty International is especially warning journalists and human rights activists to watch out for government spyware and malware, since they are the ones most targeted and deemed most dangerous to the “stable” nature of invasive governments.