The whistle-blowing WikiLeaks has a track record of revealing explosive secrets, so when three Canadian tech firms popped up on the website, it immediately raised the question: what are they hiding? WikiLeaks latest campaign, called “The Spy Files,” is aimed at exposing the use of online surveillance technologies by telecommunications companies, police forces, governments and intelligence agencies collecting private data. The site has named Canada’s Vineyard Networks, Sandvine and AdvancedIO Systems as “Western intelligence contractors,” but so far specific files have not been published online. While the companies say they have nothing to hide, the website is already causing trouble for some British and U.S. firms.The companies named by WikiLeaks design products—both hardware and software—that facilitate a practice called deep packet inspection, a way of filtering data as it passes an inspection point within a secured or unsecured network. These programs have completely legitimate purposes, whether used to manage congested Internet traffic, to diagnose potentially destructive glitches in a massive computer system, to crack dangerous organized crime rings, or to tap into an underground terror cell. But WikiLeaks is on a crusade to pinpoint the uses that a democratic government’s law-abiding citizens may not necessarily consider ethical.
In the United Kingdom, documents from several surveillance companies have been leaked onto the Spy Files website, sparking outrage. Hampshire-based Gamma Group was shown to have been providing spying programs to Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt through a third party; aptly named Hidden Technologies Systems International was discovered selling its technology to Saudi Arabia’s police force; and Creativity Software has been supplying its cellular device tracking system to an Iranian mobile phone company.