Pakistani authorities have supposedly monitored more than four million of their citizens through massive surveillance tools acquired from private foreign companies, which increases even more in the country’s cyber landscape, an international amnesty report said Tuesday.
The report, entitled “Control Shadows: Censorship and Mass Surveillance in Pakistan,” said “Pakistani authorities have continued to illegally monitor citizens of the country, including regular citizens, journalists, as well as prominent politicians.”
He said that the Legal Interception Management System (LIMS) was being used to “examine a significant part of the population’s digital activity through Pakistani telecommunications suppliers.”
“The number of low -surveillance phones could be higher since the four main mobile operators have been ordered to connect with LIMS,” said Amnesty technologist, Jurre Van Berge Reuters
Telecommunications suppliers are “under the obligation to ensure that up to two percent of their entire consumer base can be monitored,” according to the report, citing the Telecommunications Authority of Pakistan (PTA).
The authorities also use a firewall known as WMS 2.0 that inspects Internet traffic and can block two million active sessions at the same time, according to the amnesty report, further improving the surveillance system.
LIMS is a product sold by a German company called Ultimaco, which “allows the classification of Internet traffic and mobile communications, such as text and voice and voice messages. [stores] These data for the authorities to pass. “
Technology has been in use in Pakistan since 2007.
According to amnesty findings, “Utimaco’s Lims allows the authorities to examine the data of the telecommunications provider subscriber.”
Using the LIMS system, the authorities only need a person’s phone number, according to the report.
The report explained that these data “are accessible through a next -generation monitoring center (MCNG).”
“McNG is a datafusion product, previously Trovicor, which allows the authorities to examine the material collected by LIMS.” Using the MCNG system, “operators can see [who has] I have called who, when this happened, which websites were sailed, if someone could have used WhatsApp or a VPN and its location, ”he added.
The report attributed the unusual deployment of mass surveillance to the lack of technical and legal safeguards.
Amnesty recalled that the functioning of the LIMS system came to light in the case of Bushra Bibi vs Federation of Pakistan, presented at the Superior Court of Islamabad (IHC), after “a series of prominent cases of interception and filtration of calling records of calls between politicians and public figures became public in the period between 2022 and 2023” “.
The case was presented to “investigate these recordings and the legality of the interception of telecommunications.”
With additional entrance of Reuters.
