Maker of eavesdropping and surveillance app indicted
The maker of SteathGenie, a popular eavesdropping and surveillance smartphone app that’s marketed as a tool to catch cheating spouses and significant others, has been indicted.
The Washington Post reported that federal authorities on Monday, unsealed the indictment of Hammad Akbar of Lahore, Pakistan. Akbar, who serves as CEO of InvoCode, the company that makes StealthGenie, had been indicted by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia in August and was apprehended over the weekend in Los Angeles.
The indictment accuses Akbar of marketing StealthGenie’s ability to intercept phone calls in violation of the Wiretap Act. StealthGenie costs between $100 to $200 a year, and secretly listens in on phone calls and captures all kinds of electronic data from a person’s phone, including calendar entries, contacts, text messages and Web browsing history. The app can also alert a user when someone reaches a certain destination or location. According to the indictment, more than 65 percent of StealthGenie’s users were likely to have acquired the program to keep tabs on romantic partners.
“Selling spyware is not just reprehensible, it’s a crime,” Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said Monday in a statement. “Apps like StealthGenie are expressly designed for use by stalkers and domestic abusers who want to know every detail of a victim’s personal life—all without the victim’s knowledge. The Criminal Division is committed to cracking down on those who seek to profit from technology designed and used to commit brazen invasions of individual privacy.”
Domestic violence activists have long opposed tools such as StealthGenie that allow abusers to keep track of their victims without their knowledge or consent. “The fact that it’s running in surreptitious mode is what makes it so foul,” said Cindy Southworth of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, to the Washington Post. “They work really hard to make it totally secretive.” Legal experts that spoke to the Post point out there might be instances where such surveillance would be legal, but the party being watched would have to consent or be a minor.
According the Post, Akbar has been under investigation by the FBI since November 2011. “When the customer buys the product, they assume all responsibility,” Akbar wrote in a 2011 e-mail that was filed with the court, according to the Post. “We do not need to describe the legal issues.” The Post contacted Akbar’s attorney, but did not hear back.
