Prague, July 22 (CTK) – The Czech police are able to wiretap even hidden phone calls thanks to the sophisticated monitoring software they have bought from the Hacking Team Italian firm, daily Lidove noviny (LN) writes yesterday.
The information, which leaked a couple of weeks ago from Hacking Team attacked by hackers, will probably distress lobbyists as well as organised crime perpetrators who have so far thought that no one can monitor such calls.
The police are capable of following the calls through Viber or WhatsApp special programmes for smart phones as well as the popular Skype.
“Computers can remember a lot independently from their users who have often no idea about it,” Vladimir Sibor, head of the police squad for special tasks (UZC) dealing with wiretapping, told LN.
The “viruses” by which the police can gain data from computers and phones are even able to “teach” the devices to store the data, he added.
The Czech police and intelligence services have more similar programmes though they refused to confirm it, according to LN sources.
Information about their using a software from the Gamma Swiss company leaked on WikiLeaks last year, LN says.
The police assure the public that they apply such software only in exceptional cases to look into organised crime and serious financial and other crimes, such as child pornography, LN says.
In the past five years they asked for a permission to use this type of monitoring in some 300 cases, but they eventually applied it in dozens of them only, LN adds.
It writes that the police must be absolutely sure that they will “attack” the right computer. In addition, if the software were used en masse, it could be detected easily by anti-virus programmes.
The Chamber of Deputies commission for spying and wiretapping has asked Sibor to explain why the police did not inform it about having a state-of-the-art monitoring programme at their disposal and it wants to check in detail how they handle it.
The Czech police paid 18 million crowns to Hacking Team for the software.
However, hackers paradoxically attacked the firm selling security and monitoring software recently and released the list of its clients and other data on the Internet. Their customers are the security forces of South Korea, the United States, the EU member countries and Saudi Arabia as well as the Czech police UZC squad, LN writes.
It adds that cooperation with the Italian firm is quite controversial since it supplies its programmes even to undemocratic regimes.
Now, the police will have to modify their procedures or possibly buy a new software, though they have envisaged a similar information leak, LN writes, referring to Sibor.
“The only scandal in the case is the fact that the company selling monitoring software has underestimated its own security this way,” Sibor told LN.
($1=24.908 crowns)
