Snapping up cheap spy tools, nations ‘monitoring everyone’

The purchase from Israeli-American company Verint Systems, chronicled in documents, offers a rare, behind-the-scenes look into how easy it is for a country to purchase and install off-the-shelf surveillance equipment.

Except for blacklisted nations like Syria and North Korea, there is little to stop governments that routinely violate basic rights from obtaining the same so-called “lawful intercept” tools that have been sold to Western police and spy agencies.

People tracked by the technology have been beaten, jailed and tortured, according to human rights groups.

Targets include a blogger in the repressive Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan, opposition activists in the war-ravaged African nation of South Sudan, and politicians and reporters in oil-rich Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean.

The scope and sophistication revealed in the Peru documents approximates, on a small scale, U.S. and British surveillance programs cataloged in 2013 by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Joseph Bakosoro, a former South Sudanese state governor who was also held without charge for four months, said his interrogators played for him a voice mail that had been left on his cell phone.