Pressmediaofindia
Related Articles
07-05-2024
JAKARTA/ JERUSALEM: An international investigation has found that at least four Israeli-linked firms have been selling invasive spyware and cyber surveillance technology to Indonesia, which has no formal diplomatic ties with Israel and is the world’s most populous Muslim nation.
The research by Amnesty International’s Security Lab based on open sources including trade records, shipping data and internet scans uncovered links between official government bodies and agencies in the Southeast Asian country and Israeli tech firms NSO, Candiru, Wintego and Intellexa, a consortium of linked firms originally founded by a former Israeli military officer, going back to at least 2017.
German firm FinFisher, a rival to the Israeli companies and whose technology has been used to allegedly target government critics in Bahrain and Turkey, was also found to have sent such technologies to Indonesia.
Amnesty said there was little visibility about the targets of the systems.
“Highly invasive spyware tools are designed to be covert and to leave minimal traces,” it said in the report. “This built-in secrecy can make it exceedingly difficult to detect cases of unlawful misuse of these tools against civil society, and risks creating impunity-by-design for rights violations.”
It said this was of “special concern” in Indonesia where civic space had “shrunk as a result of the ongoing assault on the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association, personal security and freedom of arbitrary detention”.
Concerns about human rights have intensified in Indonesia since former general Prabowo Subianto was elected president in February at his third attempt. Prabowo, who will formally take office in October, has been accused of serious rights abuses in East Timor and West Papua, where Indigenous people have been fighting for independence from Indonesia since the 1960s. He denies the allegations against him.
The report said it had discovered “numerous spyware imports or deployments between 2017 and 2023 by companies and state agencies in Indonesia, including the Indonesian National Police (Kepala Kepolisian Negara Republik) and the National Cyber and Crypto Agency (Badan Siber dan Sandi Negara)”.
Amnesty said the Indonesian police declined to respond to its queries over the research findings, while the National Crypto and Cyber Agency had not responded to its questions by the time of publication.
The investigation noted that several of the imports passed through intermediary firms in Singapore, “which appear to be brokers with a history of supplying surveillance technologies and/or spyware to state agencies in Indonesia”.
Over an investigation lasting several months, Amnesty collaborated with Indonesian news magazine Tempo, Israeli newspaper Haaretz, and news and research organizations based in Greece and Switzerland.
This is not the first time Indonesia has been linked to Israeli spyware, with reports in 2023 finding traces of NSO’s Pegasus spyware used in the country.
In 2022, media reported that over a dozen senior Indonesian government officials and military personnel were targeted the year before with Israeli made spyware.
Amnesty’s report found that much of the spyware used required individuals to click to a link which then led them to a website.
The website imitated legitimate news outlets or political critical organizations.
The findings have raised concerns as Indonesia does not currently have laws that govern the lawful use of spyware or surveillance technologies and the civic space has “shrunk as a result of the ongoing assault on the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association”, Amnesty said. Amnesty has urged Indonesia’s government to ban highly invasive spywares. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
