Controversial ‘Stalkerware’ Used by the Police and Military

Consumer spyware is popular not just with the general population, but also with members of the US government.

According to a February 23, 2018 article on Motherboard: "Dozens of employees from US federal law enforcement agencies and the armed forces have bought smartphone malware that can, in some cases, intercept Facebook messages, track GPS locations, and remotely activate a device’s microphone, according to a large cache of data stolen by a hacker and obtained by Motherboard."

The spyware company in question is Mobistealth, which sells its products to monitor children and employees, but has also marketed malware to spy on spouses suspected of having an affair. Some label the malware as spouseware or stalkerware.

Contained in the Mobistealth data are customer accounts linked to email addresses from the FBI, DHS, TSA, ICE, and several different branches of the military. It’s not clear whether the individuals paid for the malware themselves or through their respective organizations.

But at least 40 of the Mobistealth accounts were connected to the US Army.
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This isn't the first time there have been reports of the government using spyware. In 2015, RT News reported that "Internal documents of the Italian malware maker Hacking Team, leaked online in a hacker attack, show that the FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency and the US Army all made use of its controversial spyware known as Remote Control System, or Galileo."

A 2017 article in the Huffington Post reported: "The US Army has admitted to eavesdropping on a confidential listserv of defendants and their legal counsel, taking sensitive information from the listserv vital to a pending criminal trial and passing it on... to local prosecutors, forcing a mistrial in a case the defense was winning handily. The case was later dismissed for prosecutorial misconduct. Even after US Army employees were reprimanded for this illegal activity, in a 2014 deposition the Army admitted that it "continued to anonymously spy on email listservs of political activists."

And just this month we saw reports of Social Media Surveillance of U.S. Persons by the Police and Military. 

Whether the police and military are acting within the law, and within the scope of their duties, when conducting these types of activities, is a question that can't be answered in a blog post. It is certainly possible to find government employees knowing violating law and regulation - keeping hidden files on government computer networks, ordering secret psychiatric evaluations, filing false police reports as part of harassment campaigns (In the words of the government agencies involved, they aimed to neutralize [those individuals they targeted] through a pattern of false arrests and detentions, and attacks on homes and friendships...) (Boghosian, 2013).

There can however be no question that this type of activity breeds fear and mistrust of the government. According to a 2015 Gallup Poll, 75% of Americans see widespread corruption in their government (Gallup, 2015). It is not just a belief that the government is corrupt, but an actual fear of this corruption by the majority of Americans that raises the greatest concern. According to the Chapman University Survey of American Fears: "Of the 89 potential fears the survey asked about, the one that the highest share of Americans said they were either "afraid" or "very afraid" of was federal government corruption. It was also the only fear that a majority of Americans said they shared." (Rampell, 2015) Within the top fears of Americans, after fear of corruption of government officials, the Chapman University Survey found that Americans also feared, cyber-terrorism, corporate tracking of personal information, government tracking of personal information, and identity theft (Zolfagharifard, 2015). The Pew Research Center conducted a study of public trust in government between 1958 and 2014 and found that Americans’ trust of their government was at an all-time low in 2014 (Pew Research Center, 2014).

And, now in 2018 let us ask ourselves... has our trust of government improved?