Mobily Attempts to Intercept Saudi Arabian Terrorists
June 21, 2013
The article on the thoughtcrime blog titled A Saudi Arabia Telecom’s Surveillance Pitch reads more than anything like a plea to the humanity of hackers. The author (Moxie Marlinspike) relates his communications with a Mobily agent. He learned from the agent of the telecom operating in Saudi Arabia that they were attempting to gain interception technology for mobile application data. Mobile Twitter, Viber, Line and WhatsApp were several focuses. The article relates,
“What’s depressing is that I could have easily helped them intercept basically all of the traffic they were interested in (except for Twitter – I helped write that TLS code, and I think we did it well). They later told me they’d already gotten a WhatsApp interception prototype working, and were surprised by how easy it was. The bar for most of these apps is pretty low.”
Eventually when Marlinspike refused to help the company, they accused him of terrorism (or at least terrorism by negligence). They claimed that terrorist groups were using these apps to communicate, and that they only intended to monitor them due to the inherent threat. Obviously it is naïve to believe that any government or company will have the moral compass to restrain themselves, as has been proven in the past. The article goes on to ask his fellow hackers to rethink their priorities. It may be an interesting way to collect information, but where will it end?
Chelsea Kerwin, June 21, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext.
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