You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh.

Should the tools of surveillance that states can use on their citizens be considered weapons?

That's the provocative idea from journalist Sharon Weinberger, who we're about to hear in today's talk from Ted Salon, 2020.

She retraces the birth of today's vast private spy market over the past decade,

and what should be done about it.

A few years ago, an American defense consultant I know told me about a trip he took to Uzbekistan.

His role there was to help sell technology that the Uzbek government could use to spy on its own citizens. He eventually shared with me the

marketing material he'd presented to the Uzbek government. One glossy brochure featured technology

that could not just intercept phone calls, but identify the caller regardless of what phone number they were using based on their unique voice print, and then identify their exact geographic location.

This is a guy who had been involved with the arms trade for years. He wasn't some Hollywood-type gunrunner doing backroom deals.

He was just a guy that worked with legitimate

Western companies to help sell their weapons abroad. But he wasn't bothered by marketing this

sort of technology. For him, it was just the next step in the arms trade. And it was even

easier than, say, selling weapons to Iraq because it didn't require an export license from the

U.S. State Department the way most arms sales would. It turns out that these tools of surveillance are almost completely unregulated,

because as of today, they're not defined as weapons. But they should be, and we need to regulate

them that way. I'm a journalist who spent the last two decades looking at how the military and

intelligence world spurs the development

of new science and technology. I've tracked the emergence of new weapons and look to see what happens

when companies start to market these weapons abroad. But what is a weapon in the information age?

We know that armed drones are weapons, missiles and bombs are weapons, but the State Department

actually classifies broad categories

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