Pakistani authorities ‘spying’ on millions through mass surveillance systems: Amnesty
Shutting down mobile, internet services has become regular occurrence, says report
Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD: Pakistani authorities have allegedly been surveilling over four million of its citizens, via tools of mass surveillance, acquired from private foreign companies, further clamping down on the country’s cyber landscape, an Amnesty International report revealed on Tuesday.
The report, titled “Shadows of Control: Censorship and Mass Surveillance in Pakistan“ alleged that “Pakistani authorities have continued to unlawfully surveil the country’s citizens, including regular citizens, journalists, as well as prominent politicians.”
The rights watchdog stated that Pakistani authorities allegedly “use the Lawful Intercept Management System (LIMS) to surveil a significant portion of the population’s digital activity through Pakistani telecommunications providers.”
The number of phones under surveillance could be higher as all four major mobile operators have been ordered to connect to LIMS, Amnesty technologist Jurre van Berge told Reuters.
The report, citing the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA), said that telecommunications providers were “under an obligation to ensure that up to two per cent of their entire consumer base can be surveilled.“
Authorities also employ a firewall known as WMS 2.0 that inspects internet traffic and can block two million active sessions at a time, Amnesty alleged, further enhancing the system of surveillance.
LIMS is a product sold by a German company called Ultimaco, which “allows for the classification of internet traffic and mobile communications such as text messaging and voice and [stores] this data for authorities to go through”.
The technology has been in use in Pakistan since 2007.
According to its findings, “Utimaco’s LIMS allows the authorities to sift through the telecommunications provider subscriber data”.
Using the LIMS system, the authorities only need a person’s phone number, the report said.
The report went on to explain that this data is then “made accessible through a Monitoring Centre Next Generation (McNG)”.
According to the report, “McNG is a product by Datafusion, formerly Trovicor, which allows authorities to sift through the material collected by LIMS.” Using the McNG system, “operators can see [who has] been calling whom, when this happened, what websites were browsed, if someone might’ve used WhatsApp or a VPN and their location”.
The report attributed the unchecked deployment of mass surveillance to a lack of technical and legal safeguards.
Amnesty recalled that the workings of the LIMS system came to light in the case of Bushra Bibi vs Federation of Pakistan, filed in the Islamabad High Court (IHC), after “a series of prominent cases of interception and leaking of audio recordings of calls between politicians and public figures became public” between 2022 and 2023.
According to the report, the mass surveillance in Pakistan works in conjunction with frequent internet censorship, made possible via the use of the Web Monitoring System (WMS).
The watchdog noted that the first iteration of the WMS was installed in Pakistan in 2018 by a company called Sandvine; however, according to Amnesty’s investigation, the previous WMS was replaced by a more advanced system produced by a Chinese company, Geedge Networks.
Amnesty went on to say that the new technology was a commercialised version of China’s “Great Firewall”, which is a censorship tool used by the Chinese government.
The installation of the system was ensured with the help of various foreign companies, including US-based Niagara Networks, French company Thales, and Chinese company New H3C Technologies, it said.
Regarding internet shutdowns, Amnesty noted that “the pattern of shutting down mobile and internet services in the name of maintaining law and order has become a regular occurrence”.
