Commercial surveillance vendors are companies that sell full surveillance services to governmental customers; these services include spyware, infrastructure needed to communicate with the spyware sitting on compromised devices. The spyware provides backdoor access to the devices and allows monitoring and data theft.
CSVs operate openly; they have websites, marketing content, sales and engineering teams, press relations and sometimes even attend conferences. Google estimates the number of CSVs worldwide is impossible to count; also, CSVs may change their names multiple times to avoid public scrutiny, often in response to exposure or direct legal actions against them.
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