14 DAY TRIAL // Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano reports that Italy's General Directorate for International Trade Policy has revoked the Hacking Team's export license, which prohibits the company from selling its surveillance software to countries outside the EU space.
The Hacking Team went through hard times last year, when its server was hacked and the data dumped online, including troves of sensitive information, such as email conversations, internal software, logs, exploits, and the source code of their prime surveillance toolkit called RCS, or the Remote Control System.
Despite this reputational-crippling incident, the company continued to sell its product, after making quick updates to the Galileo RCS platform during this past fall.
Hacking Team had a "no questions asked" permit from Italy's government
In spite of the fact that everyone now knew what the Hacking Team was doing, authorities never intervened to investigate the company, even after solid evidence was unearthed showing that the firm was selling surveillance software to countries known for human rights abuse.
Legally, the company was covered, after it obtained a special export license for the RCS platform on April 3, 2015. This permit allowed it to sell their surveillance software to a list of 46 countries without requiring any type of approval from Italian authorities. Normally, approval would have been needed due to the military and sensitive nature of the software's capabilities.
When Italian authorities granted the Hacking Team this permit, they refused to divulge the reason and criteria they used to reach their decision.
The revoked permit would have been valid until April 2018
Things suddenly changed last week, when the same authorities decided out of the blue to revoke this very same permit, again without providing any explanation, not even to the Hacking Team's ownership.
The permit would have been valid up until April 30, 2018. If the Hacking Team wants to sell its software under these new conditions, it would need to get approval for each sale from Italian authorities.
The permit covered countries such as Australia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Switzerland, Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Honduras, Indonesia, Israel, India, Iraqi Kurdistan, Jordan, Japan, South Korea, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Morocco, Mongolia, Mexico, Malaysia, Nigeria, Oman, Peru, the Philippines, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, the United States of America, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.
Even if no reason for the permit's revocation was provided, Italian press suspects that this might have something to do with the recent arrest, torture, and killing of an Italian reporter in Egypt.
It appears that Egyptian authorities may have used Hacking Team's RCS platform to spy on Italian student Giulio Regeni, who was conducting an investigation into the role of unions in the post-Mubarak era. Family members claim that Regeni was killed by Egyptian security forces.