UK Spyware in Bahrain: Company's Denials Called Into Question

[Malware Hazard. Image from PBCrichton/Open Clip Art Library] [Malware Hazard. Image from PBCrichton/Open Clip Art Library]

UK Spyware in Bahrain: Company's Denials Called Into Question

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following press release was issued by Bahrain Watch on 6 February 2013.]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: bill@bahrainwatch.org

Twitter: @bhwatch

February 6, 2013

UK SPYWARE IN BAHRAIN: COMPANY’S DENIALS CALLED INTO QUESTION

: New Evidence Suggests Gamma Sold FinSpy to Bahrain


[Manama] In July 2012, Bahrain Watch reported that the Government of Bahrain was targeting activists with the FinSpy/FinFisher “lawful interception” computer spyware, programmed by UK company Gamma International. An analysis revealed that the spyware steals passwords and can record screen shots, Skype calls, and audio from a computer’s microphone. The spyware sends the data it captures back to a server in Bahrain. The Bahrain Watch report cited a technical analysis by Morgan Marquis-Boire and Bahrain Watch member Bill Marczak published through CitizenLab, and a report by Bloomberg. In response to these reports, Gamma International issued several statements to the press claiming that:

(1) The version of FinSpy used in Bahrain is an old copy that might have been stolen via a flash drive during a product demonstration. [1, 2]

(2) The server in Bahrain is not a FinFisher product, but is a “proxy” that relays the captured data to another server. [3]

(3) The version of FinSpy used in Bahrain has been modified so that it does not communicate with Gamma.  If the product did communicate with Gamma, then Gamma could disable it. [4]

(4) Gamma never sold FinSpy to Bahrain. [5]

New evidence, presented in a complaint to the OECD, calls these claims into question:

(1) The version of FinSpy used in Bahrain is an old copy that might have been stolen via a flash drive during a product demonstration.

The copy of FinSpy sent to Bahraini Activists identifies itself as FinSpy 4.01, and bears a March 2012 date. However, Bahrain Watch has obtained a sample of a different version of FinSpy used in Bahrain, which predates the campaign against Bahraini activists. The other version of the spyware identifies itself as FinSpy 4.00, and has an older date. Both the FinSpy 4.01 and FinSpy 4.00 samples communicate with the same server in Bahrain. The use of two different FinSpy versions calls into question Gamma’s claim that Bahrain is using a stolen copy of FinSpy, and instead suggests that Bahrain is receiving updated spyware from Gamma.

(2) The server in Bahrain is not a FinFisher product, but is a “proxy” that relays the captured data to another server.

The server sent responses including the phrase “finspy_master” — Gamma documentation refers to the server component of a FinSpy installation as the Master. Bahrain Watch believes that Bahrain’s server is not a proxy, based both on what appeared to be a bug in the server that revealed to each single recipient the sum total number of messages sent by the server to all recipients. Analysis of this total over time showed that the server was not forwarding messages to a third party. The technical term for this bug is a “Global IP ID.”  The bug was corrected around July 2012.

(3) The version of FinSpy used in Bahrain has been modified so that it does not communicate with Gamma. If the product did communicate with Gamma, then Gamma could disable it.

Over the past several months, Bahrain Watch sent scanning probes to a number of FinSpy servers, including servers identified in Turkmenistan, Ethiopia, and Bahrain. Bahrain Watch observed behavior changes that were consistent across all servers. For example, around October 2012, an update to the servers broke a technique used by Bahrain Watch and CitizenLab to scan for FinSpy servers. That scanning technique identified FinSpy servers by detecting a bug in the FinSpy protocol. That this particular bug was corrected on all servers at roughly the same time suggests that the product in Bahrain does indeed communicate with Gamma in order to receive updates.

(4) Gamma never sold FinSpy to Bahrain.

According to leaked Gamma documentation, a FinSpy server requires a current update license purchased from Gamma in order to receive updates. Once the update license is expired, the server can no longer receive updates. The continued behavior changes on Bahrain’s server indicate a current update license, which suggests an ongoing business relationship between Gamma and Bahrain.

Bahrain Watch founding member Bill Marczak said: “It looks like Gamma is providing updates to Bahrain’s FinSpy installation. This calls into question Gamma’s claim that Bahrain stole a demonstration version of FinSpy. Given this new evidence, we call on Gamma to cease providing any software, hardware, or training — whether directly or indirectly — to the Government of Bahrain, and to disable Bahrain’s FinSpy installation. Software like FinSpy needs to be export controlled on the basis of its surveillance capabilities, and companies should face penalties if they sell their products to and end user that they should reasonably know will use their product in service of human rights violations.”

Bahrain Watch is a monitoring and advocacy group that seeks to promote effective, accountable, and transparent governance in Bahrain through research and evidence-based activism.  
About Bahrain Watch: http://bahrainwatch.org/about.html

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412