New Report Shows Phone Cracking Tech is Being Used to Target Journalists in Botswana
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Photo: David Ramos, Getty Images
The willingness of digital forensics firms to sell to pretty much any paying law enforcement agency, regardless of the country’s human rights record, has stirred up no minor amount of controversy. These tools, critics say, allow bad governments expansive, invasive powers, and may be used in the course of investigations that illegitimately target activists or journalists.
In what seems like a key example of this problem, a new report published this week by the Committee to Protect Journalists shows how U.S. and Israeli digital forensics firms were recently used by the government of Botswana to investigate several journalists for… well, that part isn’t exactly clear.