14 DAY TRIAL // Moxie Marlinspike, the famous security researcher who up until recently worked for Twitter, says he has been contacted by representatives of Mobily, one of the two telecoms companies operating in Saudi Arabia, about a new surveillance project.
“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,” Marlinspike wrote in a blog post on Monday.
It turns out that the government of Saudi Arabia has asked Mobily to implement a system that would allow them to monitor mobile data communications and block it. The expert reveals that the blocking part is already set up.
Particularly, the government targets communications sent via apps such as Mobile Twitter, Viber, Line and WhatsApp.
To make data interception possible, they will use SSL certificates issued by a Certificate Authority in the jurisdiction of the United Arab Emirates or Saudi Arabia.
Marlinspike says it will not be easy to intercept Twitter communications because of the TLS code to which he contributed while working at Twitter. On the other hand, Mobily has told the researcher that it already has a working prototype for WhatsApp surveillance.
So why does Saudi Arabia want to monitor mobile data?
According to Mobily representatives, it’s because terrorists use these communications.
After informing the company that he wasn’t interested in the job because of privacy reasons, Marlinspike was actually told that if he turned down the job, he was indirectly helping terrorists.
“If you’re in Saudi Arabia (or really anywhere), it might be prudent to think about avoiding insecure communication tools like WhatsApp and Viber (TextSecure and RedPhone could serve as appropriate secure replacements), because now we know for sure that they’re watching,” the security expert noted.