México signed 4 contracts to conduct cell phone espionage
During the past two years, the federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) purchased software that allowed it to conduct cell phone and internet espionage on a massive scale, according to a report by the newspaper El País.
The FGR signed at least four contracts worth US $5.6 million
with the company Neolinx de México in 2019 and 2020, according to government
documents. It purchased programs that allowed it to track cell phones and
collect data on internet users, the newspaper said in a report published Wednesday.
Neolinx has previously acted as a representative for the
Italian IT company Hacking Team, which allegedly sold cyber espionage programs
to former president Enrique Peña Nieto’s 2012–2018 government, but it has
represented the Israeli firm Rayzone Group in more recent times.
According to El País, the programs the FGR purchased from
Neolinx during the current government are not illegal and, according to the
authorities, are used to combat organized crime.
However, they can be used arbitrarily in a way that violates
people’s right to privacy and the presumption of innocence, as R3D, a digital
rights defense network, has warned in several reports.
While the invasion of people’s privacy by the government is
not prohibited in an absolute sense, said R3D director Luis Fernando García
Muñoz, there are strict limits on the type of surveillance activities it can
carry out. The government’s capacity to conduct cell phone and internet
espionage on a massive scale is highly problematic, he said.
“Massive surveillance is not compatible with the principles
of necessity and proportionality,” García said.
The FGR signed its first contract with Neolinx on May 30,
2019, via its organized crime unit SEIDO. According to a government report that
contains details of the US $2.4 million deal, the FGR gained access to a
program that allowed it to track cell phones in real time on 135,000 separate
occasions.
The PGR, the FGR’s predecessor, also purchased access to the
same Rayzone Group geolocation system, which is called Geomatrix.
A 2019 report by R3D and the news website Reporte Indigo
said that the PGR had used the system indiscriminately.
Rayzone Group markets the product as “a unique solution that
enables intelligence and law enforcement agencies the ability to locate …
[mobile phone] subscribers covertly virtually anywhere in the world, all in
real time, using a very friendly GUI [graphical user interface] and with
flexible capabilities of GIS [geographic information system] mapping.”
On its website, the company also says the Geomatrix system
“stealthily ascertains status, location and movement of targets of interest
from anywhere in a city and/or area to the entire country and beyond borders,
pinpointing them with high accuracy in real time.”
El País said the FGR spent US $1.1 million on Rayzone’s ECHO
system in 2019 and $1.7 million in 2020. The newspaper didn’t reveal details of
FGR’s fourth contract with Neolinx.
According to Rayzone, ECHO is a a global virtual signals
intelligence system that “utilizes a fully stealth method of collection on any
internet user.”
“ECHO is agnostic to the device type, operating system or
version, and does not require preinstallation of any physical equipment. ECHO
provides a web-based platform that allows users immediate access to perform
simple queries as well as complex investigations. ECHO provides the benefits of
both a target-centric approach (collecting information on a particular point of
interest) and data-centric approach (mass collection of all internet users in a
country).”
El País said that it didn’t receive a response when it asked
the FGR how it was using the Rayzone products.
The revelation of the purchases came the same day that
President López Obrador, defending a plan to establish a national registry of
mobile phone users, said the government had no interest in spying on anyone. He
has said previously that his government hasn’t used any espionage programs.
One of the many scandals the Peña Nieto administration faced
was the revelation that it had purchased cyber espionage programs, including
the spyware suite Pegasus for US $32 million.
It used that software to attempt to spy on journalists,
human rights defenders and other government critics.
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