For the last couple years, Morgan has focused on tracking and preventing digital attacks against high risk user groups - primarily journalists, dissidents, and activists. Increasingly, these attacks are being carried out by nation-states for espionage and surveillance purposes. Studying campaigns targeting activists in Morocco, Libya, Syria, Iran, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain during the so-called “Arab Spring” led to analysis of the global proliferation of a variety of ‘Western’ produced offensive solutions.

Against this backdrop, this talk will contextualize recent surveillance revelations with the rise of the commercial market for offensive digital capability. We'll discuss several efforts to map mass surveillance and the reasons for the increasing global propagation of targeted surveillance. We’ll journey through the response of the technology industry and examine how a change in security engineering methodology can help developers create more surveillance resistant tools and services.