To follow up on this posting, Ahram Online has a good report by Salma el-Wardani, where she reports on how telecommunication companies were not surprised by Mubarak’s orders to shut down services, as they first practiced shutdowns at the request of government officials during the 2008 Mahalla uprising.
Tag: surveillance
Surveillance chiefs to remain in service
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| From SS Officers |
The National Telecommunication Regulatory Authority NTRA has reshuffled its board, and guess what? Not only did SS General Rushdi el-Qamari keep his post, as the interior ministry’s representative on its board, but also Tarek Kamel, Mubarak’s infamous minister of telecommunication, has joined! You can find both their names on the official website of NTRA.
What kind of sick musical chairs game is going on here? How can the orchestrators of Mubarak’s crackdown on telecommunication during the uprising be rewarded posts in the new revolutionary Egypt?
UK firm offered spying software to Egyptian SS
Gamma International’s Finfisher program would have enabled government spies to monitor activists and censor websites, according to documents obtained by activists after storming State Security Police headquarters in Nasr City:
One of the papers, in English and headed Finfisher Proposal: Commercial Offer, contained an offer dated 29 June 2010 to provide “FinSpy” software, hardware, installation and training to the SSI for €287,000 (£255,000). The name on the invoice, dated Tuesday 29 June 2010, was Gamma International UK Limited.
Other documents, written in Arabic and marked “ultimately confidential”, state that after being offered a “free trial version” of Gamma’s Finfisher software to test its ability to hack into email accounts, the SSI concluded it was “a high-level security system” that could get into email accounts of Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo, as well as allowing “full control” of the computers of “targeted elements”. It went on to describe the software’s “success in breaking through personal accounts on Skype network, which is considered the most secure method of communication used by members of the elements of the harmful activity because it is encrypted”.