The Security Alliance
Thousands of protesters stormed the headquarters of Egypt's State Security forces headquarters in Alexandria, Cairo, and a nearby town, shutting down its operations across the country, and seizing control of the vast archive of records. Egyptian ex-patriots are calling the day Egypt's Bastille Day. Revelations are pouring out onto the Twitter hashtag #AmnDawla and the Facebook profile, Amn Dawla Leaks. Documents found at the State Security HQ reveal that it uses a product acquired from a German company called Gamma Group to hack into email and Skype accounts.
Gamma Group, in cooperation with Elaman GmbH, offers a wide variety of products, services, and customized solutions from several locations worldwide. Due to our combined international experience and technical knowhow, we also offer consulting and training services that meet the requirements of our customers. The Gamma-Elaman partnership, with a combined worldwide workforce of 50 employees, has successfully been involved over the past five years in multi-million Euro projects. Gamma and Elaman operate out of offices located in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Far East. In the field of telecommunications, data retention generally refers to the storage of call related information (numbers, date, time, position, etc.) of telephony and internet traffic. The stored data are usually telephone calls made and received, emails sent and received, websites visited, and location data. The primary objective in data retention is traffic analysis and mass surveillance. By analyzing the retained data governments can identify an individual's location, their associates, and members of a group, such as political opponents. Active GSM monitoring systems simulate a GSM base station to attract GSM phones away from the normal GSM network and log into the system's "faked" virtual base station. As soon as the phone is logged onto the active system, its identity is extracted (IMSI and IMEI). By logging the phone onto the virtual base station the phone can be forced to transmit on a given channel, frequency and time-slot (establishing a "silent call"). This transmission can be picked up by a direction finding system (vehicle based or handheld) which then gives the exact position of the target phone. Phones can be completely taken off the real network ("intelligent jamming"), fake calls and SMS can be sent to the target phone, and private networking can be realized and the battery of the target phone can be drained. The active system also allows operating within UMTS networks. Collecting the identity of the target phone (IMSI, IMEI) can be done without bringing the phone down to GSM/GPRS, therefore, no jamming of the overall UMTS signal is needed. For all other operations, such as locating the phone, the target UMTS phone will be pushed back into GSM mode. A passive IP interception system receives all "raw" IP traffic which needs to get filtered, stored, decoded, and viewed. The problem here is that no encrypted IP-traffic can be restored or decrypted (e.g. VPN, HTTPS, Skype, PGP, etc.). This problem can be solved if the intercepted IP data can be grabbed directly from the target PC because encryption takes place "behind" the target PC. This can be achieved using IT-Intrusion Software. Of course, such an approach is only target-based, i.e. the target must be known, and if a Trojan is embedded on the PC all IP traffic can be intercepted.
Excessive awareness of one's rights
Amnesty International has urged the Ukrainian authorities to stop the harassment of a trade union activist who remains in hiding after a court ordered him to undergo a forced psychiatric examination last week. A court in Vinnytsia granted the order for an examination after prosecutors argued that Andrey Bondarenko has an "excessive awareness of his own and others' rights and an uncontrollable readiness to defend these rights in unrealistic ways."
Belarus: Mass Arrests of Opposition Activists
Human rights and opposition groups in Belarus said police arrested several activists at their offices in Minsk and cities throughout the country, seizing computers, flash cards, and discs, Charter 97 and Radio Svaboda reported on Tuesday.
Police raided the offices of the Speak the Truth campaign in Minsk, two NGOs in Mogilev, the Social Democratic Party in Brest, and the homes of opposition activists and independent journalists in Minsk, Hrodna, Brest, Slonim, and Babruysk. Vladimir Neklyayev, leader of the Speak the Truth campaign, was arrested together with around 20 campaign members in the group's offices in Minsk. The police raid also targeted the oldest opposition party in Belarus, the United Civil Party. More information:http://www.charter97.org/en/news/2010/5/18/29082/http://naviny.by/rubrics/english/2010/05/18/ic_articles_259_167856
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