Revealed: The Secret Guide to Encryption, Hacking, and Surveillance for Governments Mark Wilson - BetaNews
go to original November 4, 2014

Remote Control System (RCS) is a solution designed to evade encryption by means of an agent directly installed on the device to monitor. (Hacking Team)

There is now great interest in the level of governmental interference that takes place into online activity. Edward Snowden told the world about what the NSA was up to and there are now numerous websites dealing with the revelation that he made. One such site is The Intercept, and it has just published the secret manuals that are supplied to governments who want to use a suite of specialist tools to monitor web users' activities.

Sub-titled "the hacking suite for governmental interception", RCS 9 (or Remote Control System) is a suite of tools from Hacking Team. The Italian security and surveillance company is responsible for providing hacking and monitoring guides and software to a list of countries including Colombia, Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia. RCS itself is "a solution designed to evade encryption" - the sort of encryption put in place by Google.

RCS 9 - which goes by the name of Galileo - is itself no secret. Hacking Team advertizes it on its web site, and there's even a suitably hackery and threatening sounding video (above) explaining what it does. But there is a problem; RCS need to be "installed on the device to monitor". Not to worry - there's a guide to building a software agent in the manual and details of how to deploy it via USB, email or by force. Once in place, "evidence collection on monitored devices is stealth and transmission of collected data from the device to the RCS server is encrypted and untraceable".

While, at the moment, it seems that RCS is only sold to governments and agencies in certain parts of the world, it's certainly the sort of things that the US and the UK would be interested in. The Intercept reports that Hacking Team has made appearance at homeland security trade shows and conferences. If you like the idea of getting your hands on what amounts to commercial spyware, you're out of luck.

Read the rest at BetaNews

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