Human rights group Amnesty International released free software on Thursday that allows users to determine if their computers are bugged by government intelligence agencies.
The program, Detekt, was designed specifically for human rights activists and journalists, whose computers governments regularly target, Amnesty said.
“Governments are increasingly using dangerous and sophisticated technology that allows them to read activists and journalists’ private emails and remotely turn on their computer’s camera or microphone to secretly record their activities,” said Marek Marczynski of Amnesty International.
“They use the technology in a cowardly attempt to prevent abuses from being exposed,” he added.
In many place, journalists and activists with sensitive information are at risk of arrest, torture and even execution.
Detekt was developed in partnership with Internet-rights groups Digitale Geselleschaft, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Privacy International. It is offered for free at resistsurveillance.org, and available in English, Spanish, Amharic, Arabic, Italian and German.
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