Western technology helping curb Middle East dissent Sunday, 28 August 2011 03:24

By Vernon Silver &

Ben Elgin

The interrogation of Abdul Ghani Al Khanjar followed a pattern.

First, Bahraini jailers armed with stiff rubber hoses beat the 39-year-old school administrator and human rights activist in a windowless room two stories below ground in the Gulf kingdom’s National Security Apparatus building. Then, they dragged him upstairs for questioning by a uniformed officer armed with another kind of weapon: transcripts of his text messages and details from personal mobile phone conversations, he says.

“It was amazing,” says Al Khanjar, who was detained from August 2010 to February. “How did they know about these?”

The answer: Computers loaded with Western-made surveillance software generated the transcripts wielded in the interrogations described by Al Khanjar and scores of other detainees whose similar treatment was tracked by rights activists.

The spy gear in Bahrain was sold by Siemens, and maintained by Nokia Siemens Networks and NSN’s divested unit, Trovicor, according to two people whose positions at the companies gave them direct knowledge of the installations. Both requested anonymity because they have signed non-disclosure agreements. The sale and maintenance contracts were also confirmed by Ben Roome, a Nokia Siemens spokesman based in Farnborough, England.

The only way officers could have obtained messages was through the interception program, says Ahmed Aldoseri, director of information and communications technologies at Bahrain’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority. While he won’t disclose details about the program, he says, “If they have a transcript of an SMS message, it’s because the security organ was monitoring the user at their monitoring centre.”

Companies are free to sell such equipment almost anywhere. For the most part, the United States and European countries lack export controls to deter the use of such systems for repression.

“The technology is becoming very sophisticated, and the only thing limiting it is how deeply governments want to snoop into lives,” says Rob Faris, research director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Some industry insiders now say their own products have become dangerous in the hands of regimes where law enforcement crosses the line to repression.

The images of the Arab spring crackdowns earlier this year unnerved Nikhil Gyamlani, who as a consultant for Trovicor and Nokia Siemens had developed monitoring systems and sold them to some of the countries. The authorities jammed or restricted communications to stymie gatherings and knew where to send riot police before a protest could even start, according to eyewitness reports.

For that to happen, government officials had to have some means of figuring out where to go or whom to target to nip protests in the bud, Gyamlani, 34, says.

“There’s very little chance a government is smart enough without this technology,” he says. Gyamlani says nondisclosure agreements with his former employers prohibit him from revealing details about specific countries he worked with.

Across the Middle East in recent years, sales teams at Siemens, Nokia Siemens, Munich-based Trovicor and other companies have worked their connections among spy masters, police chiefs and military officers to provide country after country with monitoring gear, industry executives say. Their story is a window into a secretive world of surveillance businesses that is transforming the political and social fabric of countries from North Africa to the Persian Gulf.

Monitoring centres are sold around the globe by these companies and their competitors. They form the heart of so-called lawful interception systems. The equipment is marketed largely to law enforcement agencies tracking terrorists and other criminals.

The toolbox allows more than the interception of phone calls, emails, text messages and Voice Over Internet Protocol calls such as those made using Skype. Some products can also secretly activate laptop webcams or microphones on mobile devices. They can change the contents of written communications in mid-transmission, use voice recognition to scan phone networks, and pinpoint people’s locations through their mobile phones. The monitoring systems can scan communications for key words or recognize voices and then feed the data and recordings to operators at government agencies.

Besides Bahrain, several other Middle Eastern nations that cracked down on uprisings this year — including Egypt, Syria and Yemen — also purchased monitoring centres from the chain of businesses now known as Trovicor. Trovicor equipment plays a surveillance role in at least 12 Middle Eastern and North African nations, according to the two people familiar with the installations.

Trovicor’s precursor, which started in 1993 as the voice- and data-recording unit of Siemens, in 2007 became part of Nokia Siemens Networks. NSN, a joint venture with Espoo, Finland-based Nokia, sold the unit, known as Intelligence Solutions, in March 2009. The new owners, Guernsey-based Perusa Partners Fund 1, renamed the business Trovicor.

“We are very aware that communications technology can be used for good and ill,” NSN spokesman Roome says. The elevated risk of human rights abuses was a major reason for NSN’s exiting the monitoring-centre business, and the company has since established a human rights policy and due diligence programme, he says.

“Ultimately people who use this technology to infringe human rights are responsible for their actions,” he says.

Asked whether Trovicor or its predecessors sold monitoring centres to Middle Eastern nations that have cracked down on uprisings this year, Roome says the company can’t talk about specific countries. NSN retained little documentation on the business after divesting it and has no data about the scope of its monitoring-centre sales in the Mideast, he says.

Wolfram Trost, a spokesman for Munich-based Siemens, Europe’s largest engineering company, says he can’t comment because all documentation from the intelligence solutions unit had been transferred to Nokia Siemens.

Birgitt Fischer-Harrow, Trovicor’s head of marketing communications, said Trovicor’s contracts prevented it from disclosing its customers or the countries where it does business. She declined to comment further.

Trovicor’s owners only invest in ethical businesses, says Christian Hollenberg, a founder of Munich-based Perusa GmbH, the adviser to the Perusa investment fund. He includes in that category Trovicor, which the fund owns in its entirety.

“It’s a legal business, and it’s part of every communications network in the civilized world,” he says.

In Bahrain, officials routinely use surveillance in the arrest and torture of political opponents, according to Nabeel Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. He says he has evidence of this from former detainees, including Al Khanjar, and their lawyers and family members.

NSN and Trovicor’s status as exclusive provider in Bahrain continued at least through 2009, the two people familiar with the installation say. That period of more than two years coincides with the dates of text messages used to interrogate scores of political detainees, human rights advocate Rajab says.

Based on his conversations with former detainees and their representatives, he says that authorities used messages that dated as far back as the mid-2000s, even in recent interrogations.

Since July 24, a commission investigating human rights violations in Bahrain has recorded 140 allegations of physical abuse and torture, according to an Augut 10 statement on its website.

“The first things we’re hearing is there wasn’t systematic abuse or torture, but there were abuses by rogue individuals within the security apparatus,” says government spokesman Abdulaziz bin Mubarak Al Khalifa, the international counsellor at Bahrain’s Information Affairs Authority. He says he isn’t in a position to comment on surveillance equipment or a specific interrogation.

Bahraini government regulator Aldoseri says the companies are all too happy to sell the equipment regardless of what happens once it’s installed.

“If you provide someone with a knife, you expect them to use it responsibly,” he says. That’s not necessarily the case with surveillance companies, he says.

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