Pakistani authorities have allegedly been surveilling over four million of its citizens through mass surveillance tools acquired from private foreign companies, further clamping down on the country’s cyber landscape, an Amnesty International report said on Tuesday.
The report, titled “Shadows of Control: Censorship and Mass Surveillance in Pakistan“, said that “Pakistani authorities have continued to unlawfully surveil the country’s citizens, including regular citizens, journalists, as well as prominent politicians.”
It said that the Lawful Intercept Management System (LIMS) was being used to “surveil a significant portion of the population’s digital activity through Pakistani telecommunications providers.”
“The number of phones under surveillance could be higher as all four major mobile operators have been ordered to connect to LIMS,” Amnesty technologist Jurre van Berge told Reuters.
Telecommunications providers are “under an obligation to ensure that up to two per cent of their entire consumer base can be surveilled,“ the report said, citing the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA).
Authorities also employ a firewall known as WMS 2.0 that inspects internet traffic and can block two million active sessions at a time, the Amnesty report said, further enhancing the system of surveillance.
LIMS is a product sold by a German company called Ultimaco, which “allows for the classification of internet traffic and mobile communications such as text messaging and voice and [stores] this data for authorities to go through.”
The technology has been in use in Pakistan since 2007.
According to Amnesty’s findings, “Utimaco’s LIMS allows the authorities to sift through the telecommunications provider subscriber data.”
Using the LIMS system, the authorities only need a person’s phone number, the report said.
The report went on to explain that this data is then “made accessible through a Monitoring Centre Next Generation (McNG).”
“McNG is a product by Datafusion, formerly Trovicor, which allows authorities to sift through the material collected by LIMS.” Using the McNG system, “operators can see [who has] been calling whom, when this happened, what websites were browsed, if someone might’ve used WhatsApp or a VPN and their location,” it added.
The report attributed the unchecked deployment of mass surveillance to a lack of technical and legal safeguards.
Amnesty recalled that the workings of the LIMS system came to light in the case of Bushra Bibi vs Federation of Pakistan, filed in the Islamabad High Court (IHC), after “a series of prominent cases of interception and leaking of audio recordings of calls between politicians and public figures became public in the period between 2022 and 2023.”
The case was filed to “investigate these recordings and the legality of interception of telecoms.”
With addtional input from Reuters.
