It should come as no surprise to anyone who has seen even five minutes of news in the past year that we are all being watched. Credit card scammers seem to be able to pull information from even the most secure-sounding websites, the NSA has its hands in – well, everything – and even the UK’s intelligence agency GCHQ condones spying on what they deem to be “foreign transmissions”. While these governmental practices may have some benefit for the sake of national security or anti-terrorism efforts, they can also have dire consequences for journalists and human rights activists. Now, thanks to a tool called Detekt, human rights organizations hope to lessen the number of victims falling prey to spyware in the cyberwar by making their new anti-spyware technology free to the public.

Detekt was developed by German security researcher Claudio Guarnieri and is being backed by a coalition of human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Privacy International and Digitale Gesellschaft. It has been designed specifically for Windows PC users to scan their computers for known surveillance spyware that its makers warn is used to “target and monitor human rights defenders and journalists around the world”. Detekt has been made widely available with its release today as a free and open source software tool, and by all counts has the best of intentions. However, for now the app only works with Windows; and that isn’t its only limitation.

While it can scan for both commercial malware as well as popular spyware used by cybercriminals (thank BlackShades RAT of Gh0st RAT), it can only do just that- scan and detect. The current version cannot remove the malware infection, which is why Detekt’s officials warn on their website that if there are any traces of malware on your computer or laptop, you should stop using it “immediately” and seek help. The website goes on to add that Detekt “does not provide a conclusive guarantee that your computer is not compromised by the spyware it aims to detect. The tool is provided as is, without warranties or guarantees of any kind”.

So the software helps some as far as detecting known spyware, but it isn’t enough – which is kind of the point a lot of these organizations are trying to make. Listen up kids, internet users, journalists, gamers, developers, and “regular people” – technology alone won’t cure the problem. What it can do, what the creators of Detekt hope to do, is to shine further public light on the issue, keeping it in the forefront of the media in an effort to show governing bodies how imperative it is for them to change their data capture practices. Amnesty best summarized the mission of Detekt in a press statement today, stating “Our ultimate aim is for human rights defenders, journalists and civil society groups to be able to carry out their legitimate work without fear of surveillance, harassment, intimidation, arrest or torture”.