The Spy Files

The Spy Files was our first large publication on the private surveillance industry. On 1 December 2011 I released 287 documents concerning as many as 160 intelligence contractors, presenting them as the start of a continuing project. A second instalment followed on 8 December 2011, a third — 249 documents from 92 contractors — on 4 September 2013, and a fourth, focused on the FinFisher spyware suite, on 15 September 2014.

Our launch statement described an industry selling systems for bulk interception of telephone and internet traffic, mobile-phone location tracking, voice analysis and covert takeover of computers and phones. It named, among others, Gamma (United Kingdom), Amesys (France), VASTech (South Africa) and ZTE (China), whose equipment it said had been found in monitoring facilities in Egypt and Libya after the 2011 uprisings, and Trovicor, which it said had supplied interception technology to the government of Bahrain.

The publication focused attention on exports of surveillance technology to governments with poor human-rights records. Our 2014 instalment noted that, since the first release, researchers had documented FinFisher products in use against journalists, activists and political dissidents in several countries.

I did not describe how we obtained the material. The first release was prepared with the research groups Bugged Planet and Privacy International and with media organisations in six countries: ARD (Germany), the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (United Kingdom), The Hindu (India), L'Espresso (Italy), OWNI (France) and The Washington Post (United States).

The fourth instalment (September 2014) included copies of FinFisher software and indexed material from a separate breach of the company's systems, according to us. The Spy Files releases were widely reported at the time, including by the Knight Center's LatAm Journalism Review, which cited the figures of 287 files and 160 companies in 25 countries.