The State has traditionally been extremely reluctant to release details about its use of spyware against Irish citizens.
Last year, then minister for justice Helen McEntee refused to confirm whether the State uses such technology, although she added that when used properly, spyware “can play a legitimate and important role in supporting the work of law enforcement agencies and security services”.
Around the time McEntee said this, An Garda Síochána made payments totalling €278,000 to an Israeli company, Cognyte, which manufactures sophisticated surveillance software.
Oddly, the payments are detailed in documents uploaded to an obscure corner of the Garda website. Details of sensitive acquisitions are not normally included in publicly available procurement documents, suggesting the inclusion of the Cognyte payments may have been inadvertent.
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The documents indicate the payments were made under an Office of Government Procurement (OGP) framework. Products purchased in this way can be shared with other agencies.
This suggests that whatever was purchased from Cognyte, one of the main players in Israel’s burgeoning espionage industry, may also be used by other security bodies including the Revenue, Fiosrú and Military Intelligence.
A Freedom of Information request shed little light, except to say the payments “relate to purchases by the Garda Security and Intelligence Section”, which oversees surveillance.
The Department of Justice and Garda press office declined to provide further information. This leaves the public to speculate what products the force is purchasing from Cognyte.
The company’s flagship offering is what it calls an “investigations analytics platform”, a powerful piece of software capable of amalgamating masses of data in one place. The software uses facial recognition, artificial intelligence and large language models to, in Cognyte’s words, “reveal hidden insights and deeper context” for investigators.
For example, using the software, a garda could pull up the file of a criminal and click on a tab showing all intercepted text message communications involving this person. One tab might show the last time they were caught on CCTV footage while another would list their social media accounts.
Few people would have an issue with gardaí using sophisticated technology to target gang bosses. However, a brief look at Cognyte’s history shows how this technology can be abused.
When Cognyte was under the control of its parent company Verint Systems, Indonesian authorities used its products to keep track of members of the LGBT community and religious minorities, according to an investigation by Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
In Azerbaijan, police used it to gather the sexual inclinations of people from their Facebook accounts. Forty-five gay men and transgender women were later arrested and tortured, the newspaper reported.
Cognyte’s investigation analytics platform is no secret. In May, at a conference in Dublin for law enforcement agencies, Cognyte employees extolled the benefits of the programme to gardaí in attendance. It offers a free demo on its website.
Other products are not advertised so publicly, however. This includes interception software sold to Myanmar, where the Rohingya people face persecution.
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The most comprehensive insight into Cognyte’s more secretive products came in 2023 when federal police in Brazil opened an investigation into the actions of one of its intelligence services during the term of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro’s regime was accused of using a secretive Cognyte product called First Mile to track the location of political opponents. By simply inputting a target’s phone number, users could track them live by monitoring the cell towers the phones connected to.
Authorities have accused the officials of illegally tracking 33,000 individuals including politicians, journalists and lawyers.
Cognyte also manufacturers more traditional espionage products, including tools capable of intercepting internet data, texts and phone calls.
According to an Amnesty International report, authorities in South Sudan were able to use a Cognyte product to intercept every phone conversation in the country.
Last year, the Dutch newspaper NRC reported that authorities in the Netherlands purchased a telephone and data-tapping system from Cognyte without informing parliament. This was to replace a previous system, made by another Israeli surveillance company, Elbit, which reportedly did not work.
The Cognyte system also did not work, the newspaper reported.
