Human Rights Organizations Launch Free Anti-Surveillance...

Human Rights Organizations Launch Free Anti-Surveillance Tool

Vlad Tiganasu,
10 years ago
Editor Informer Technologies, Inc.

Human Rights Organizations Launch Free Anti-Surveillance Tool

Computer and Internet-based surveillance has been a growing issue in the last few years. There's irrefutable proof that this kind of technology can be used for the greater good as it helped in capturing terrorists, child molesters or drug dealers, but in most cases, unfortunately, it is applied for less than honest purposes. That is why several human rights organizations have partnered up to create a completely free anti-surveillance tool available to all those in need of privacy and security. The result of their efforts is an application called Detekt.

Human rights organization Amnesty International and digital privacy organizations EFF, Privacy International, and Digitale Gesellschaft have teamed up to create Detect, a free tool that can find the spyware installed on your Windows-based computer. The application itself was created by Claudio Guarnieri, a security researcher based in Berlin.

In order to use the tool you will need to first close all other applications running on your computer and disable or unplug the Internet connection. Detekt will start scanning your system and, if it finds any malicious programs, you shouldn't plug in the Internet connection back, until the situation is figured out. The good thing is that the application provides a lot of (non-technical) details about the spyware that it detects so you will easily be able to understand its purpose, threat level, and provenience. The drawback is that Detekt is unable to deal with the treats itself, so you will need to either use another application or request help from a tech expert.

By its own creators admission, Detekt isn't perfect but a "best effort application". You need to remember that in the computer world, as soon as a tool capable of identifying specific spyware is released, a newer, harder-to-find version of malware appears. So, even if an application was really great today, by tomorrow it might no longer have the same power. No security app can offer a guarantee that your computer is 100% free of malware and that is the fact everyone with knowledge on the matter can confirm.

Source: TechCrunch.

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I totally agree. I understand there are threats in our society, but those individuals are the first ones that protect themselves from being spotted and identified. Normal people on the other hand will suffer from those scums stating they are "doing this to protect all of you", while they're actually stealing our freedom and putting us all in chains. So, for me, the right answer is just learning to protect by ourselves and not resign our lives in those hands.
My life is JUST mine, not anybody else.

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Do you care what happens to your children and loved ones? Do you even have children and loved ones? If you do, where will you turn to when they themselves – your own family, your own children – are faced with abduction, torture, violent molestation or death? Will you turn then to the very authorities whom you sought to emasculate with the devices that you have been gloating about in this article? Where will you run to when Child Abuse and Lethal Terrorism come knocking on YOUR door?

Suffering from Internet Paranoia? Then don't do bad things. lol

Human Rights activism is an important part of our modern societies, activists sometimes even put their lives on the line, and risk injury and imprisonment in the cause of protecting and advancing our freedoms and liberties. These are all very well, and laudable, in times of comparative peace and when the main obstacle to the upward progress of our species is the tendencies to absolutism and despotism awakened in some of our fellow men and women when they begin to wield political power: this tendency is as old as the hills, and encapsulated in Lord Acton's aphorism, "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely". But every person who has had anything like a decent education knows that there is a time and place for everything, and when our communities and way of life and national integrity are under threat from terrorists and murderers launched from other shores is NOT THE TIME to seek to deprive our security establishment of the means of sniffing them out. So I would urge you all to have the gumption to recognize an unprecedented threat to our security when you see it.

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You say, "Human rights organizations have partnered up to create a completely free anti-surveillance tool available to all those in need of privacy and security". Well, it is antisocial and psychopathic freaks in our society - such as terrorists, child-molesters, and drug dealers who most need "privacy and security" to carry out their despicable, parasitic private programs which are utterly destructive of our societies. So are you saying that human rights organisations are willingly, deliberately and with open knowledge devoting their technical skills to designing method by which these dregs of society and scum of humankind can continue their activities protected from scrutiny by the law-enforcement mechanisms of our society? Is this the point to which our so-called love of liberty and freedom has led us? Are these the depths to which you believe that we as a society should be descending to? - that scoundrels such as these should be protected in the name of 'FREEDOM'??

Well, you won't find me subscribing to this idiocy. I am law-abiding, and as fond of liberty and freedom as any man or woman nurtured in the freedom-loving culture of Western liberalism, and regard Liberty as our proudest and most sacred inheritance. But alongside that I have brains enough to realize that there are wicked people among us – some of them home-grown, but some of them imported from countries without this tradition/inheritance – which is specifically Western, and who do not hesitate to use our own love of liberty and freedom to our detriment as a shield behind which to deploy their murderously evil and corrosive activities; and I would rather see their freedom to unleash their depraved ideologies and practices upon us curtailed even if it means giving up certain forms of 'freedom' - such as the ability to carry out computer-based activities unscrutinized, which really are fringe 'freedoms' that occupy only the outer borders of our wider liberties, the loss of which shouldn't make any serious-minded man or woman (who has nothing to hide) uncomfortable in any way significantly.
Please stop this tomfoolery, and stop contributing to the ways in which our enemies can hurt us. They are depraved, utterly unscrupulous and ruthless, and the last thing we need is for our own societies to turn against us by helping our enemies conceal the very activities that they use to harm us and our children.

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Human Rights Organizations Launch Free Anti-Surveillance Tool

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