So Basically I went off the hacking scene for a while, starting playing games more, coding, etc.
Since that happened something called HackingTeam happened. I see things about it on wikileaks.
From what I can tell they where employed by governments to perform spying operations. Is this correct?
That's what the tech-press is reporting so far, yes. Following the logic that wikileaks would not jeopardize their reputation by fabricating stuff (who would fabricate that many mails and what would be the gain?) and that the press can't lie about such emails (because they would be easily proven wrong) it should be true.
The tl;dr seems to be:
Hacking Team is based in Italy, in the European Union. They do business with European and other first world governments. They claimed that they only do business with non-repressive governments (as non repressive as western countries). But they did business with countries with "less than stellar" human rights records, even over shell companies to avoid export restrictions.
HT advised it's customers to stop the use of their software since the leak. The company might be done for since they have a lot of angry customers. Angry customers with access to death squads as Bruce so nicely said: "It's one thing to have dissatisfied customers. It's another to have
dissatisfied customers with death squads. I don't think the company is
going to survive this."
There are export restrictions for weapons into regions of crisis in place in Europe. They do not work that well but such blatant misuse will probably not remain without consequences.
The upside of all that is: HT's stash contained two unknown flash vulnerabilities and there will probably be even more to be found. These are costly losses.