It seems an entire industry is secretly supplying govt's around the globe with software and hardware monitoring of their citizens, no secret to many here but the scope of this underhand activity has been revealed as something to be very concerned about.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/12/gallery-how-the-surveillance-industry-markets-spyware-to-governments.arsA collection of documents recently published by Wikileaks casts a light on surveillance vendors who sell intrusive monitoring technology to governments and law enforcement agencies. This growing industry—which serves countries around the world—offers the ability to monitor entire populations and circumvent the privacy and security safeguards built into conventional consumer technology
If we contrast this activity with the near shameless lack of regulatory provision for protecting folks privacy rights it seems simply a matter of time before non governmental entities acquire and abuse the tools offered by many of these countries and we all know many of the worlds despots already have such tools in their arsenals of oppression.
At least its now also clear why some commonly known software exploits are not patched in good time, the security services are actively using exploits and holes in software for their own ends and who wouldn't want to help them do so given a possible scenario of preventing terrorism ?
