خره مينه لګته وي
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Farhatullah Babar measures every word he speaks. His caution, partially at least, results from the burden of being the long-standing spokesperson for Asif Ali Zardari who attracts negative attention like no other political figure has in recent times. Some part of Babar’s restraint has its origin in his stint in the parliament, mostly as an opposition senator. Yet, there is another hazy but very real reason why he seems to weigh his sentences before he utters them: he fears someone maybe listening in on him. “The state agencies continue to invade privacy,” he says.
Sitting in a usable part of an otherwise crumbling old building in Islamabad, Babar looks like a character from a Hollywood detective thriller. “The scope of surveillance has increased recently,” he says, as lights flicker in the empty halls around him which once housed the offices of the Urdu daily Musawat, published by the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in the 1970s. “Many people feel their phones are being intercepted,” he says in his signature low husky voice.
One of his colleagues in the senate, Saleem Mandviwalla who, like Babar, belongs to the PPP, is on record as having complained about such interception. At a meeting of a senate committee in January this year, Mandviwalla waived official documents to claim the federal government had authorised the tapping of his phone and interception of his personal data.
Illustration by Aan Abbas
Aftab Sultan, the head of the Intelligence Bureau (IB), was present in the meeting but he denied any knowledge of the authorisation. He said no official working under him could intercept any communication without first bringing it to his knowledge. He also said that only the prime minister could approve such interception and, that too, if the source of communication was a terrorist. No one really believed him.
Intelligence agencies in Pakistan have hardly managed to stay away from communications exchanged among citizens. In the 1990s, monitoring and interception of these communications was so pervasive that governments rose and fell as a result of them. Even though the political climate has changed since then, intelligence agencies continue to tap phones and other means of communication used by politicians, human rights activists, journalists and government officials, among others. A report released by Privacy International, an advocacy group based in the United Kingdom, claimed earlier this year that various intelligence agencies were tapping thousands of phones in Pakistan.
If anything, says Babar, the state’s capacity for surveillance has grown over time. “The rapid growth of technology has increased the ability of intelligence agencies to intrude private space,” he says. “The bigger the technological advances are, the greater the invasion of privacy is.”
The Privacy International report is based on extensive research and hundreds of interviews about the prevalence of surveillance in Pakistan’s cyberspace. Titled asTipping the Scales: Surveillance and Security in Pakistan, the report makes some startling revelations.
Since 2005, it says, different intelligence agencies have acquired surveillance technology from top technology companies in the world. These companies include France-based phone manufacturer Alcatel, communications giant Ericsson, Chinese equipment manufacturer Huawei and cyber security providers SS8 and Utimaco. Based on such equipment purchases, the report claims, the surveillance capacity of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) – Pakistan’s globally renowned military-run secret agency – has outgrown the legal and regulatory mechanisms available both locally and internationally.
Some of the information presented in the report is based on 400 gigabytes of digital documents hacked from the computer network of Hacking Team, an Italian firm that specialises in Remote Control System, a spying software. The hacked information was originally released by WikiLeaks on July 8, 2015, and carried extensive details of correspondence between the Hacking Team and multiple contractors working on the behalf of different Pakistani law enforcement and intelligence agencies including the ISI, the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), the ministry of defence and the Sindh Police.
Some of this correspondence appears to have started in 2009, but the earliest hacked email comes from 2011 and the last one was exchanged in May 2015, as reported by Jahanzaib Haque and Atika Rehman in the daily Dawn and dawn.com in late July. “Aside from allowing access to photos, emails, chat conversations, social media accounts and passwords, the software [that Pakistani entities were trying to procure from the Hacking Team] can tap phone and Skype calls, take photographs using the infected device’s camera and switch on a device’s microphone — all without the user’s knowledge, and without affecting a device’s battery life,” the two wrote.
The irony is that the intelligence agencies were willing to share virtual space with their nemesis in order to be able to suppress the freedom of expression and the right to privacy of Pakistan’s own citizens. In February 2014, the Hacking Team staff conducted a webinar in which both India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and Pakistan’s IB participated.
There have been other reports making similar claims about the presence of interception devices and surveillance software in Pakistan’s cyberspace. An organisation working on freedom of expression and digital rights, Bytes for All, filed a complaint at the Lahore High Court in 2013 against the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA), citing a long list of websites and digital platforms being monitored, and also censored, by the state authorities. A final judgment on the complaint, commonly known as the YouTube Case, is still pending at the Supreme Court.
In February 2014, Bolo Bhi, a Karachi-based advocacy and research group working on digital rights, filed a request for information under the right to information law. The request was prompted by a report released on April 30, 2013 by the Citizen Lab, a laboratory based at the University of Toronto, Canada, which focuses on “the intersection of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), human rights, and global security.” The laboratory claimed to have detected the presence of FinFisher Command and Control Servers in Pakistan. Sold around the world by the UK-based Gamma Group, these servers operate digital spy softwares to conduct mass surveillance. In May 2014, the PTA, which regulates domestic Internet and telecommunications services, said in its response to Bolo Bhi’s request for information that it had no knowledge of the presence of these servers.
The authors of the report did not know who had set up and was operating these servers. It could be Pakistani intelligence agencies or the secret agencies of other states.
Perhaps the most disturbing disclosure in this regard came from Edward Snowden, the American defence consultant who removed the lid off surveillance and monitoring activities carried out by the secret agencies of the US and the United Kingdom within their own countries as well as abroad. A news report published in the daily Guardian based on documents made public by Snowden, said the British e-spy agency, General Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), had acquired the ability to not only access “almost any user of the Internet” inside the entire country of Pakistan, but also “to re-route selective traffic across international links towards GCHQ’s passive collection systems.”
Such intrusive surveillance could not have been possible without the participation, or at least silent cooperation, of the Pakistani authorities, Privacy International reports. Pakistan is known to have signed an agreement with the United States on sharing signal intelligence and, under this arrangement, Pakistan has become one of the largest receivers of funds from America’s National Security Agency (NSA) to improve its spying and surveillance capacities under the signal intelligence agreement. The agreement guarantees that the relationship between the two countries is a “long-term one” involving “higher degrees of trust” and “greater levels of cooperation”.
According to Privacy International, Pakistan receives “technical solutions (for example, hardware or software) and/or access to related technology” in return for its “willingness to do something politically risky,” such as surveillance and interception of personal and institutional communications.
The WikiLeaks papers show that a large part of this sharing of signal intelligence was allowing the NSA and the GCHQ to monitor and intercept the internal and external communications of many senior politicians and leaders of major political parties in Pakistan, including the PPP. “It was quite worrying,” says Babar, while talking about his party’s reaction when the extent of the surveillance by the Americans and the British first became public.
“We always knew that the [Pakistani] security agencies tapped our telephone lines,” he says. That the American and British agencies can also access phone records, retrieve email messages and can even activate hidden cameras within Pakistan points out that they “are as heavily involved here as our own agencies.”
The Privacy International report also suggests domestic agencies have been doing their level best to stay ahead of their foreign counterparts. The group reports that for at least two years the ISI has been looking for software and equipment that could easily dwarf all previous mechanisms to monitor, intercept and divert digital telecommunications.
“In June 2013, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s best known intelligence agency, sought to develop a mass surveillance system by directly tapping the main fibre optic cables entering Pakistan that carried most of the nation’s network communication data,” says the Privacy International report. The agency sought proposals for a “Targeted IP Monitoring System and COE [Common Operations Environments]” that could capture and store approximately 660 gigabits of Internet Protocol (IP) traffic per second. “ This system would make available virtually all of the nation’s domestic and international communications data for scrutiny, the most significant expansion of the government’s capacity to conduct mass surveillance to date,” the report adds.
“What the ISI wanted to build … was a complete surveillance system that would capture mobile communications data, including Wi-Fi, all broadband Internet traffic, and any data transmitted over 3G,” says the report. The interception under the proposed system was to be “seamless” and “not be detectable or visible to the subscriber”.
Imagine someone looking into every email you send or receive, or every phone call or text message you exchange, or every website you visit — and add the fact that you don’t even know that your communications are being watched. Hair-raising stuff, indeed.
The Privacy International acknowledges that “only a handful of governments have managed to capture all communications of their citizens” but, according to Dr Richard Tynan, a technologist working with the group, in many states, including Pakistan, “interception and storage technology is being enhanced all the time.” Once enhanced capability for monitoring and intercepting Internet communications become available to the governments seeking them, he warns, it will be “a very dangerous development.” If and when these states have the required mechanisms in place, says Tynan, “many citizens may have to assume their communications are ending up in some monitoring centres because they pass along tapped links.”
Illustration by Safwan Subzwari
Though the ISI has specified in its request for the proposals that the system it is seeking should be “capable of monitoring 1,000 to 5,000 concurrent targets,” it would only require additional desks and more computers to increase the number of targets to be monitored. In its second phase, the Privacy International report says, the system would need to capture “all international Internet Protocol (IP) traffic at present,” from three landing sites for international fibre optic cables and from two satellite data aggregation sites. The ISI, according to the report, has also sought to collect subscriber information from 60 Internet and broadband service providers. “Comparing this subscriber data with IP addresses would allow the intelligence service to accurately identify users accessing Internet sites,” the report says.
It is not possible to confirm if the ISI has got what it wanted. Investigations carried out by the Herald suggest the only states capable of putting together financial and technological resources for creating a mass surveillance system similar to the one sought by the ISI are the highly developed ones, such as China and the US. It is also clear that the required system could be built only by a company with a very sophisticated level of technological expertise. Since no Pakistani company seems to have the required level of expertise, engaging a foreign firm which can get a security clearance for the purpose also seems like a time-consuming exercise. Such questions related to costs and capacity, therefore, suggest that the agency may still be some way away from getting what it has been seeking.
Even if the ISI does not yet have the technological and financial resources to access all the data flowing through Pakistan’s cyberspace, it has the unqualified blessing of the law to tap into personal communications of any individual or institution, as and when it wants. The state’s ability to monitor and intercept private communications is, indeed, built into the regulatory regime. The undertaking that all Internet service providers give when they apply to the PTA for a licence makes it mandatory for them that they” shall meet the requirements of authorised security agencies for legal interception of calls and messages.”
The service providers in Pakistan are widely known to have complied with official requests for access to their data since the 1990s. Only in recent months, both the ISI and its civilian counterpart, IB, are known to have received access to Internet data operated by various service providers.
Like many things good or bad prevalent in today’s Pakistan, interception of private communication has its origin in the British colonial rule in the Indian subcontinent. Historically, such interception was done by the Special Branch of the police, the Criminal Investigation Agency and the IB, but it was largely restricted – even well after the British had left – to physical surveillance and monitoring through informants.
The first extraordinary instance of what was then known as wiretapping, was an authorisation by then prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto for the setting up of a special cell within the IB to monitor the senior officials of the armed forces after the dismissal of Gul Hassan Khan as army chief and Rahim Khan as air force chief in 1972. The cell was led by one Colonel Mukhtar and was called Mukhtar Force after him (not to be mixed with a Shia welfare organisation of almost the same name). Its staff consisted entirely of retired military officers.
Dr Hamid Hussain, an independent researcher based in New York who has studied the working of intelligence agencies in Pakistan, says the cell was shut down after Bhutto was removed in a military coup in 1977. Mukhtar was sacked and all records at the cell were seized by the coup makers.
Bhutto was also the first, and so far the only, prime minister to have ordered the ISI to tap the phones of his political opponents after protests broke out against his government in the first half of 1977. He would be the last civilian ruler to exercise direct control over the ISI.
Following General Ziaul Haq’s military coup, the role and the capacity of the military’s intelligence agencies increased, as they closely collaborated with the US during the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan. The Americans provided generous technical assistance to improve the surveillance capacity of Pakistani intelligence agencies, particularly the ISI.
It was also during the 1980s that Amjad Alvi, a self-taught techie in Lahore, started importing computer hardware to assemble some of the first computer networks in Pakistan. He was also one of the first Internet service providers in the country. In 1985, his company imported its first modem, and in 1987 started an electronic bulletin board service to transmit brief messages across a small network of computers linked to each other through dial-in modems. “This service was like a blog or a chat room,” says Alvi, only on a very limited scale.
All this was taking place without any government knowledge of it, adds Alvi who also has the dubious distinction of developing the Brain Virus in 1985: one of the first softwares to disrupt hundreds of thousands of individual and networked computers around the globe. “The state has never been able to grasp how cyberspace works, he says and then narrates how some intelligence officials came to see him, after they had received information that he had devised a system to send and receive documents through electronic communication. The officials were curious to know how a telephone could transfer and receive data, he says. “They also wanted to ensure that I did not use the technology without security clearance.”
Alvi did not have trouble in obtaining the clearance. “Since I am a patriot, they cleared me instantly.”
Encounters with Alvi helped intelligence operatives understand the new beast on the block. “We worked on raising the government’s awareness about how the cyber world functions,” he says. That could very well be the beginning of the end of the freedom of computer-based communication in Pakistan, as Alvi and those sharing his network knew it to be.
By the 1990s, post-Zia politics had factionalised along civil-military lines on the one hand and along party lines on the other. This factionalism was also reflected in the working of intelligence agencies. While the ISI was tapping the phones of politicians, especially those belonging to the PPP, the IB was mainly active in counter-intelligence to minimise the political impacts of the ISI’s operations. This was the era of what came to be called Operation Midnight Jackal; in a secret operation an IB operative recorded and leaked secret conversations about an army-supported move to remove Benazir Bhutto as the prime minister of Pakistan through a no-trust vote in the National Assembly.
Masood Sharif Khattak was one of the central characters in the operation. Trained in intelligence operations during his brief stint in the army, which he left as a major, due to medical reasons, he joined the IB in 1989 under Benazir Bhutto’s orders. The reason for his induction was to strengthen the civilian intelligence agency as a counterweight to the military-controlled ISI. “It is our political history which did not allow the IB to grow,” Khattak tells the Herald in an interview.
When he became the agency’s director general under another PPP government between 1993 and 1996, he initiated a major move to recruit more people and acquire new technology for the agency. He claims to have acquired the first computers for it. “[The IB] was not the way it should have been when I took over,” he says.
With more power came controversy.
By the latter half of 1996, the Khattak-led IB was being accused of widespread phone tapping. Enjoying blanket permission from the government for surveillance, his spooks were alleged to have tapped the phone conversations of the Chief Justice of Pakistan Sajjad Ali Shah, Chief Justice of the Sindh High Court, Nasir Aslam Zahid, and many other judges serving at the Supreme Court as well as the high courts of Sindh and Punjab. They are also reported to have intercepted and recorded phone conversations of many important politicians, including Nawaz Sharif and Maulana Fazlur Rehman.
The allegations became a part of a case that Benazir Bhutto filed against the dismissal of her government by then President Farooq Leghari. In more ways than one, the judgement in the case set very strict limits on what, when and who the intelligence agencies could monitor, and what they could never do under any circumstances. “The Constitution in clear terms guarantees that the dignity of man and subject to law, the privacy of home, shall be inviolable and further that no person shall be deprived of life or liberty save in accordance with the law,” read the verdict. “Home in literal sense will mean a place of abode — a place where a person enjoys personal freedom and feels secure ... the term ‘home’ connotes meaning of privacy, security and non-interference by outsiders which a person enjoys,” it added in an attempt to set the limits within which a person has the inviolable protection of constitutionally guaranteed freedoms.
The verdict linked the “inviolability of privacy” with the “dignity of man.” It said, “If a man is to preserve his dignity, if he is to live with honour and reputation, his privacy, whether in home or outside the home has to be saved from invasion and protected from illegal intrusion.” The authors of the judgement also declared that phone-tapping or eavesdropping by intelligence agencies “interferes with the right of free speech and expression.”
The judges finally directed the government that “in future whenever any telephone is required to be tapped, taped, intruded or eavesdropping exercise is to be carried on, it should be done with the prior permission of the Supreme Court or by a Commission constituted by the Supreme Court which shall examine each case on its merits.”
Khattak recalls a judge asking him during proceedings in the case as to what national interest was served by tapping the phones of senior judges. “I responded by saying that as an intelligence chief I have the right to know what is happening if two pillars of the state are on a collision course, because that collision brings about instability in the country.”
This was not the first time in Pakistan that someone was citing national interest to defend what the court would ultimately declare as a “reprehensible, immoral, illegal and unconstitutional act.” Nor was it the last.
Photo by White Star
In 1996, the federal government enacted the Pakistan Telecommunication (Re-Organisation) Act which under the rubric of national interest gave extensive powers to intelligence agencies to wiretap calls and intercept messages. Section 54 of the act states that “the Federal Government may authorise any person or persons to intercept calls and messages or to trace calls through any telecommunication system.” The only condition set by the law was that this would be done “in the interest of national security or in the apprehension of any offence.” It does not require a legal expert to point out that “interest” and “apprehension” are both such vague words that they can be interpreted differently by different people or by the same people in different circumstances.
A year later, parliament passed the Anti-terrorism Act (ATA) which gave the law enforcement and security agencies the power to search and enter premises without a warrant. In a landmark judgement, the Lahore High Court struck down many parts of the ATA as unconstitutional, but it “upheld these powers by citing the global community’s experience with terrorism,” according to Lahore-based lawyer Waqqas Mir, who has recently authored a research paper on laws infringing upon privacy and freedom of speech and association. “The court held that increased powers intruding upon privacy were necessary to counterterrorism.” While hearing appeals against the Lahore Court’s judgment, the Supreme Court also upheld this view. “The right [to privacy] was not absolute and could be curtailed to counterterrorism,” ruled the apex court.
Mir says the courts have tackled questions of privacy and protection of personal information and data in a number of cases since the 1990s with varying interpretations but “the law has not always kept pace with technology.” Rapid changes in technology have always surpassed the parameters set in each of these verdicts.
To cite just one example, the introduction of +92 as Pakistan’s international direct dialing code made it easier to tap or intercept calls. As compared to the old switchboard-based manual system which required physical intervention by the intelligence operatives and required time to listen in on phone conversations, the new digital system could route any calls through surveillance apparatus at the flick of a button on a computer keyboard.
Instead of providing legal protection to the citizens against these technology-enabled threats to their privacy, the government has allowed the intelligence agencies to continue their surveillance without let or hindrance. In February 2001, this impunity culminated into another scandal. A British newspaper, Sunday Times, shocked everyone in Pakistan by printing the transcripts of phone conversations between Nawaz Sharif and two judges who had convicted Benazir Bhutto and her husband, Zardari, during Sharif’s second tenure as prime minister between 1997 and 1999.
“… [T]he publication of the transcripts… has once again brought into focus the role of intelligence agencies in Pakistan. Clearly, the agencies continue to tap telephones and use other methods to eavesdrop with wild abandon,” wrote Mubashir Zaidi in a report published in the March 2001 issue of the Herald.
Illustration by Safwan Subzwari
He also reported the Attorney General of Pakistan at the time, Aziz A Munshi, claimed soon after Sharif’s ouster from power in 1999 that his government, “had tapped the telephones of judges of the superior courts.” Zaidi cited a 75-page list of telephone numbers that Munshi had presented before the Supreme Court, claiming that, besides the judges, Sharif had authorised the tapping of phone conversations of many other people including politicians, journalists and government functionaries.
Zaidi cited his own investigations to report that , “at least 10 intelligence agencies and departments…[continue to] indulge in telephone tapping.” He, therefore, concluded: “Whatever the fallout of the tapes scandal may be, it is unlikely to end large-scale telephone tapping.”
The state was to prove him right as it continued to expand the surveillance capabilities of its intelligence agencies throughout the 2000s. It was during this decade that the cyber section of the ISI was formed. The government is also said to have acquired some monitoring and interception equipment from China and North Korea at some stage but the biggest fillip came from an unexpected quarter. In the post 9/11 world, the US once again needed Pakistan’s cooperation in tackling al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and Washington and London became willing providers of technical assistance and modern equipment to Pakistani intelligence and security agencies.
In order to monitor and intercept communications between militants belonging to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the American NSA set up a number of listening posts within Pakistan where surveillance operations were jointly carried out by the Americans and officials of the ISI, says independent researcher Hussain. Most of this cooperation only ended following the raid that killed al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in 2011, he adds.
The civilian intelligence agency, the IB, has also continued to expand apace in the meanwhile. The incumbent government has removed the ban on recruitments and its operations are being expanded and equipment being upgraded, according to a 2014 news report released by the Online news agency. The news report also said that billions of rupees were being spent on purchasing surveillance equipment from German company Utimaco in order to improve the IB’s capacity to “keep an eye on other domestic agencies as well as terrorist activities.” The equipment is reported to have the ability to monitor and intercept calls and text messages made through such Internet-based platforms as Gmail, Viber and Blackberry.
Aware of the security risks involved in purchasing sensitive surveillance equipment from foreign manufacturers, the authorities have been also investing considerable amount of money and effort to build indigenous research and development capabilities. An Islamabad-based private company, Center for Advanced Research in Engineering, has collaborated with the National Radio Telecommunications Corporation, a government institution that manufactures telecommunication and electronic equipment, to develop network surveillance and encryption tools, according to Privacy International.
Similarly, the National University of Science and Technology (NUST), which works in close collaboration with the military, engaged a renowned computer scientist, Dr Syed Ali Khayyam, to set up the Wireless and Secure Networks (WiSNet) Research Lab at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in Islamabad. One of the main functions of this lab is to produce software and equipment that can secure Pakistani security and intelligence agencies against cyber attacks from outside.
“Our mobile and fixed line cyber infrastructure is extremely vulnerable to attacks,” Khayyam tells the Herald in an interview from California, where he works for an American company called PLUMgrid after having left NUST sometime ago. Foreign intelligence agencies, as well as individual hackers, can monitor the data traffic on this infrastructure. They also may have the ability to steal and destroy this data, he says. “A national cyber catastrophe is just a disaster waiting to happen,” he adds.
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