Can Cyber Mercenaries and Human Rights Defenders Coexist?
Bill Marczak, Cooper Quintin, Eva Galperin
BSidesSF 2025 — Here Be Dragons · Day 1 · Main
The panel's opening answer — "no" — barely scratched the surface of a decade-long arms race between spyware vendors and the researchers chasing them. Cooper Quintin (EFF), Bill Marczak (Citizen Lab), and Eva Galperin (EFF) laid out why the commercial spyware industry is structurally incompatible with human rights, traced the industry's geographic drift from Europe to Israel and back to Cyprus and Spain, and closed with sharp commentary on who in Silicon Valley is helping fund the problem today. ---
AI review
Three of the most credible researchers tracking mercenary spyware on a single stage — this is the rare panel where the participants actually earned their reputations through years of documented fieldwork. The analysis of plausible deniability as a deliberate product feature, not a side effect, is the sharpest framing I've seen on this problem. The VC-starvation argument at the close is blunt and probably the most actionable thing said all day.