Saudi telco asks Moxie Marlinspike to help to build a mobile spying system
Apparently Saudi based telecom operator, Mobily, has been busy buiilding a system for intercepting mobile communications including Twitter, Viber and Whatsapp. They approached world famous Moxie Marlinspike for help and in a blog post, Moxie relates the correspondence he had with Yasser D. Airuhaily, executibve manager of network information security at Mobily:
Last week I was contacted by an agent of Mobily, one of two telecoms operating in Saudi Arabia, about a surveillance project that they’re working on in that country. Having published two reasonably popular MITM tools, it’s not uncommon for me to get emails requesting that I help people with their interception projects. I typically don’t respond, but this one (an email titled “Solution for monitoring encrypted data on telecom”) caught my eye.
I was interested to know more about what they were up to, so I wrote back and asked. After a week of correspondence, I learned that they are organizing a program to intercept mobile application data, with specific interest in monitoring:
Mobile Twitter
Viber
Line
