Anybody Can Hire A Team Of Spies

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The plan was simple: give the government of Uzbekistan the ability to monitor everyone’s communications.

 

I first heard the story about five years ago from an American defense consultant.  I had spoken to him over the years about arms sales, particularly those involving the former Soviet Union. He had been involved in overseeing foreign military sales for the American government before he went into the private sector, using his expertise to help broker deals around the world. In 2014, the market in Uzbekistan looked promising.

 

It was the same year that Human Rights Watch declared that “Uzbekistan’s human rights record remained abysmal across a wide spectrum of violations.” Islam Karimov, the country’s president at the time, reportedly boiled at least one of his enemies alive. The Uzbek government wanted to buy what is known in official parlance as “lawful interception,” and among privacy advocates as surveillance technology. The American company the defense consultant was working for was offering the Uzbeks technology to surveil cellphone and internet communications as well as fixed landlines.

 

A small team representing the American company went to Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, to meet with officials and tell them what they had to offer. “We don’t want to stop people from using the internet, we want to control it,” the American defense consultant said the Uzbek general in charge of the procurement told one of his colleagues.

It was by any measure a memorable trip. In the evening, the defense consultant and his colleagues walked around the city, taking in the modern luxury hotels and Soviet-era Brutalist architecture. Knowing the Uzbek government would monitor foreign visitors whom it suspected of being spies or involved in political activities, the group made sure to keep to the main streets, so it wouldn’t appear they were trying to do anything secretive. (There were even stranger aspects to the trip: At one point, the consultant recalled, the Uzbek hosts sent prostitutes to his group’s hotel; the women were turned away by hotel security.)

 

After the American defense consultant told me about the trip, I’d filed it away in my mental archive as one of those stories I often hear about the strange underbelly of the overseas defense market. But more than five years later, the type of technology he was selling has become more widespread, and more controversial.

 

High-tech surveillance technology, once the purview of sophisticated spy services in wealthy countries, is now being offered by private contractors around the world as part of a highly secretive multibillion-dollar industry.

 

In the past year, there have been at least two high-profile reports that authoritarian states have used Western surveillance technology intended to track down criminals and terrorists to spy on journalists or political activists: The United Arab Emirates company DarkMatter allegedly spied on journalists (a claim the company denies); the Saudi government has been accused of using spyware made by the Israeli firm NSO Group to hack into the phone of a close associate of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi writer killed in his country’s consulate in Istanbul last October. And in the United States, security researchers are raising the alarm that cheaper versions of this technology are being used and abused by private consumers.

 

While other kinds of weapons are subjected to stringent international regimes and norms — even if these are often broken — the trade in spy technology is barely regulated. The American defense consultant, who shared materials and details so long as I agreed not to use his name or the name of his company because it would endanger his professional contacts abroad, was quick to point out that nothing in what he was proposing in 2014 was illegal. It still isn’t.

But allowing this sort of technology to fall into the wrong hands can have the same impact as selling a lethal weapon. If you have a cellphone, “you are enabling your surveillance,” said Alec Ross, a senior adviser on innovation to Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state. “The capabilities of foreign intelligence services are only growing. This issue creates a body count.”

In the end, the company that the American defense consultant represented didn’t get the contract. He heard that the business went to an Israeli firm, though he had no way of knowing for sure — the government of Uzbekistan never posted the tender online, let alone announced the winner. But his assumption appears to be backed up by a 2015 report from Privacy International, a nongovernmental organization that tracks the export of surveillance technology, that said two companies operating from Israel had set up monitoring centers in Uzbekistan with the ability to intercept any phone, ensuring the “communications of every individual are within the reach of the security and law enforcement agencies.”

 

Uzbeks have given detailed accounts of their surveillance. Gulasal Kamolova, a journalist who fled Uzbekistan in 2015 and now lives in France, told Amnesty International that she believes her mobile phone has been under surveillance since 2008. She described how once, while she was still in Uzbekistan, she was contacted by an Uzbek security services officer who said, shortly after she received an international call: “You got a call from abroad. Who was calling?”

 

Ms. Kamolova worries that the Uzbek security service still tracks her number in France. She has reason to be concerned: The marketing material the American defense consultant’s company gave to the Uzbeks said the company could search for a phone user based on his unique “voice print,” regardless of what phone number he’s using, and to pinpoint his location. Another document described an option for “worldwide tracking of mobile phones.”

 

Did an Israeli surveillance company help intercept Ms. Kamolova’s call? It’s impossible to know because who gets what contracts is almost never public knowledge, and it is a complex business involving software companies, hardware vendors and even traditional telecoms.

Stephen E. Arnold, a former manager at Booz Allen Hamilton and a specialist in online systems for law enforcement and intelligence software, told me that most estimates of the value are “pure baloney,” and said creating a realistic estimate would require collecting data that most companies are loath to provide. One market research report claims that it could be worth $3.3 billion in the next few years; the NSO Group, which has been raising money, is more optimistic, saying the industry is valued at some $12 billion.

 

One thing is clear: The private surveillance industry is growing. A firm that creates a catalog of these technologies, once named the “Little Black Book of Electronic Surveillance” changed the name in 2016 to the “Big BlackBook.” It had doubled in size in its first three years. The 2017 edition includes 150 vendors.
 

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