what would AV's complicity in government spying look like?

as you may well have heard, the EFF and a bunch of security experts have written an open letter to the AV industry asking about any possible involvement by them in the mass spying scandal that has been in the headlines for much of this year. at first i thought this was old news for AV, since the issue of government trojans has actually been around a lot longer than the current spying revelations. i thought these people had simply failed to do their homework but, as time passed, the wheels began to turn and i started thinking differently. now i think the question we should all be asking ourselves is, what would AV's complicity look like?

some background, first. the subject of government trojans have been around for over a decade. magic lantern, for example, dates back to 2001 (or at least public awareness of it does). so it should come as little surprise that the question of whether the AV industry looks the other way has come up before. in 2007 cnet ran a story where 13 different vendors were asked about this very thing. they all more or less denied being a party to such shenanigans, but i suggest you read the article and pay careful attention to the answers.

now earlier this year one of the first controversial spying revelations to come about was about a program called PRISM which a whole bunch of well known, big name internet companies (including google, microsoft, yahoo, facebook, etc) were apparently involved with. the companies all denied it of course, and it turns out they may be legally required to do so.

that adds an interesting wrinkle to the question now being put towards the AV industry; would they be allowed to admit to any complicity that might be going on? they say actions speek louder than words, so maybe we should look for something other than the carefully crafted assurances of multi-million dollar corporations. maybe what we should be looking for is the same thing that alerted us to the mass spying in the first place - a leak. maybe then we can get a glimpse of their actions.

back in early 2011 a rather spectacular breach occurred. security firm hbgary was breached by some members of anonymous, and one of the things that leaked out was the fact that hbgary wrote malware for the government. in fact, it doesn't take much imagination to suppose that this would be the very type of malware the EFF et al are concerned the AV industry may have been asked to ignore.

it's unknown whether any AV vendor actually did field such a request. i have my doubts since traditional commercial malware writers seem to be perfectly capable of creating undetected malware without making such requests. that being said, one fact that became rather suspicious in light of the revelations about hbgary was the fact that they were partners with mcafee, one of the biggest AV vendors around and certainly one of the best known names in AV. i wrote about this apparent ethical conflict back in february of 2011, and then again in march of 2011 to note the tremendous non-reaction from the industry. i even went so far as to create a blog specifically for keeping an eye on the industry (though as an outsider myself there was little i could do on my own).

the EFF and others want to know if the AV industry has been complicit in the government's spying. well, one AV vendor was notably evasive when asked by cnet in 2007 about their handling of governmental trojans/police spyware. that same AV vendor was and still is partnered with a company that wrote government malware (in all likelihood for very purpose in question).  furthermore, in the intervening years, nothing has come of it. no other vendor has said anything or done anything to call attention to or raise awareness of this partnership. even after the mass surveillance controversy started earlier this year, not a one bothered to raise the alarm and suggest that mcafee might at least in principle be compromised by that partnership, even though they certainly could have benefited from disrupting mcafee's market share. no one thought they could profit from it? no one thought it was their duty to warn people of a potential problem? to raise concerns that the protection mcafee's customers receive may suffer in some way because of their close ties with government malware writers? to give voice to the doubts this partnership creates even after publicly wringing their hands over how wrong what the government themselves were doing was?

AV vendors may or may not have been asked to turn a blind eye to government malware - we may never know, and it's impossible to prove a negative. but they've done a heck of a job turning a blind eye to the people who make government malware and to those in their own ranks who got in bed with government malware writers. i asked at the beginning what AV complicity would look like and i think when it comes to those whose job it is to raise an alarm, complicity would probably have to look like silence (and something about silence makes me sick).

(2013-10-29 13:21 - updated to change the open letter link to point to the blog post that includes the list of intended recipients as well as a link to the letter itself)