A murky twist in the fight between the ruling party and the military old guard

DURING an interview with a Turkish minister recently, your correspondent was asked to remove the battery from her mobile telephone. “Otherwise our conversation will be tapped,” the minister explained. His paranoia may be understandable; over the past week Turkey’s elite has been rocked by tales of politicians, judges and journalists being wiretapped. Even the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, complained that “they eavesdropped on me for six years”.

Much about this story remains murky. It is not clear, for instance, who might have been listening in on Mr Erdogan. Indeed, the scandal mainly involves allegations that the justice ministry, led by Mr Erdogan’s Justice and Development (AK) party, has been monitoring members of the elite suspected of involvement with coup-plotters in the so-called Ergenekon case.

The uproar started when Istanbul’s top prosecutor, Aykut Cengiz Engin, discovered his calls were being recorded. Some 55 other judges and prosecutors were being similarly tapped under orders from the justice ministry. “This is worse than Watergate,” fumed Deniz Baykal, the leader of the pro-secular main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).

The justice minister, Sadullah Ergin, says the surveillance was legal and he may have been right. But as Husnu Ondul, a human-rights activist, puts it, “it’s the laws that are screwed up and most of them were passed by the AK party.” Under these broad legal powers, he says, “it is possible for a person to be tapped separately and concurrently by the police, the national intelligence services and the gendarmerie.”

Turkey’s chief prosecutor, Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, who spearheaded a court case last year to ban AK, has seized on the affair to threaten to investigate whether the wiretaps were in breach of the constitution. If so, this could provide him with another excuse to try to shut down AK.

The row has little to do with justice. Rather, it is another twist in the long-running power struggle between Mr Erdogan and his mildly Islamist party, and an old guard led by the generals that has steadily lost ground. The army’s standing has been damaged by a slew of leaked documents detailing plans to foment chaos and topple the government. AK is hitting back with new laws pruning the army’s powers. The secret wiretaps may be just another weapon in this political fight.

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Gold Lock is proud to announce that Douglas Haskins, Channel Manager-North America, is scheduled to be interviewed by Federal News Radio AM1500 in Washington, DC, Monday 12/14/09 at 8:30am (eastern time).  Federal News Radio contacted Gold Lock to schedule the radio interview to discuss the Gold Lock Hacker Challenge: a $250,00o prize to anyone who can hack a 10 minute encrypted conversation.

Would be hackers are free to use any tools or technology at their disposal. This contest is open to anyone, anywhere, unless your participation is specifically prohibited by law.

Hackers have until 12:00 AM (GMT/UTC + 02:00 hours) on February 1st 2010 to provide us with the transcript. Read the contest rules for complete details and restrictions. Be sure to complete the entry form on that page before you start trying to grab the gold.

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Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.

The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint’s Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at awiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.

It is unclear if Federal law enforcement agencies’ extensive collection of geolocation data should have been disclosed to Congress pursuant to a 1999 law that requires the publication of certain surveillance statistics — since the Department of Justice simply ignores the law, and has not provided the legally mandated reports to Congress since 2004.

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The board did not disclose in its statement why Jones was fired. His attorney said Jones was dismissed over his decision last April to place hidden microphones in three executives’ offices.

Jones has denied wrongdoing, insisting he only intended to record his own conversations with executives who had twisted his statements before. The owner of the company that installed the microphones told police the recorder never worked and the microphones were later removed.

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But that’s not the most serious misuse of a telecommunications surveillance infrastructure. In Greece, between June 2004 and March 2005, someone wiretapped more than 100 cell phones belonging to members of the Greek government — the prime minister and the ministers of defense, foreign affairs and justice.

Ericsson built this wiretapping capability into Vodafone’s products, and enabled it only for governments that requested it. Greece wasn’t one of those governments, but someone still unknown — a rival political party? organized crime? — figured out how to surreptitiously turn the feature on.

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The National Security Agency tried to wiretap a member of the U.S. Congress without a warrant, and has engaged in “significant and systemic” illegal surveillance activities in the last few months including e-mail and telephone call interceptions, according to a report this week.

The article in Wednesday’s New York Times said the Obama administration acknowledged there had been abuses but said they had been resolved. The attempted eavesdropping on a congressman came about because he or she was part of a delegation to the Middle East in 2005 or 2006, and was ultimately blocked.

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The recordings revealed by the media were taped by Business Track (BTR) — a 5-year-old company controlled by former Peruvian navy officials — which formally provided services to protect companies’ information and informally intervened private conversations related to “illegal businesses”. 

According to Mario Vargas Llosa, writing in El Pais, this practice seems to be “dictatorship’s sequels” , a leftover from Fujimori’s regime. The head of the Peru’s intelligence service, Vladimiro Montensinos, generalized the use of chuponeo to track and intimidate opponents, and to extort politicians, military officers, officials and others engaged in illegal activities or even bribed by Fugimori’s government. Apparently, Business Track was created by former officers who were used to do this job during Fugimori’s rule and that found profitable to offer their services to the private sector. As a result of these disclosures, the Peruvian Prosecution has imprisoned six members of Business Track for illegally intervening private phone conversations. 

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BOGOTA, Colombia (CNN) – Colombia’s domestic intelligence agency, which is embroiled in an illegal wiretap investigation, no longer will be directly in charge of electronic interceptions, President Alvaro Uribe said Thursday.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has said that he did not order any wiretaps.

All wiretaps now will be under the control of the National Police, Uribe said at an early-morning news conference.

The Administrative Department of Security, known by its Spanish acronym DAS, is under investigation over allegations that it illegally wiretapped judges, opposition politicians, members of the ruling party and journalists.

“We will continue reform of DAS,” Uribe said.

Electronic intelligence gathering will continue, Uribe said, but DAS will have to obtain a judge’s order and approval from the National Police.

“The police will verify that the request contains all the legal documents, and then the interception will proceed,” Uribe said.

The president sought to reassure Colombians that the National Police, which also had been accused of conducting illegal wiretaps, has made strenuous efforts to fix the problem.

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