March 26, 2014 | Quote

With New Chinese Cyber-tools, Ethiopia More Easily Spies on its People

Ethiopia’s government is deploying cutting-edge cyber and phone surveillance technologies from China and other nations to conduct widespread spying aimed at suppressing political dissent, according to a new report.

Using modern technology from Chinese telecom giant ZTE, Ethiopia’s state telecom company has spent the last five years meshing that gear with additional spy software from European suppliers to create government surveillance tools spanning social media, phone, and Internet communications, says the report by New-York based Human Rights Watch. 

With that powerful system now in place, the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) coalition is using its new capacities to ferret out and harass its political opponents, according to the report titled “They Know Everything We Do: Telecom and Internet Surveillance in Ethiopia.”

“Some of these Chinese and other companies have been complicit in the worst human rights abuses in Iran and Syria by providing these regimes with all too often hidden [cyber-surveillance] tools of oppression,” says Toby Dershowitz, vice president at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington research institute, in an e-mail interview.

The surveillance technologies “are not only used to stifle debate but to surveil, hunt down and even torture those whose views differ from these governments,” Ms. Dershowitz writes. “Those who don’t like this preview won’t like the movie to come if these companies and countries are not held accountable.”

Read the full article here.