Beware, someone is prying into your phone conversations

Kenya: The text messages in your phone
can easily be accessed by intelligence
agencies and even private individuals
keen to know your personal secrets.
Hacking of SMS data and emails is already
at the centre of an international scandal
in which the United States government
was caught red-handed snooping into the
communication secrets of presidents of
foreign countries like Germany and
Mexico.
Closer home, suspicion has always been
rife that our own National Intelligence
Service (NIS) has been creeping behind
our backs to know what we communicate
using our phones and computers.
In fact, monitoring of telephone
conversations was prevalent even before
the advent of mobile telephony.
Hacking and tapping of communication
channels for prominent personalities and
persons of interest to governments
started in Kenya way back during the era
of the Special Branch Unit.
According to a former spy who spoke to
us on condition of anonymity, the hacking
of communication channels in Kenya
started when the country had fixed
telephone lines.
“We used to have our officers stationed
at the Kenya Post and Telecom
Corporation offices countrywide. They
would monitor telephone conversations of
senior government officers and even
intercept mails,” said the former spy who
worked for the government for more
than 15 years.
Recently, Nairobi Senator Mike Sonko was
in the news when he bragged that he
uses spy technology better than those at
the disposal of the country’s spy
organisation.
Some spy applications like ‘ownspy’ that
can be installed on smart telephones like
the iPhone enable one to record all calls
he gets and to intercept calls being made
to or from other telephones, provided
consent was previously given by the
owner of the phone to be intercepted.
In the United States, Barack Obama’s
government is battling damning
revelations that its National Security
Agency (NSA) was spying on foreign
countries, most of them allies like Kenya.
In one case, it has been revealed that
NSA, besides hacking into the presidential
computer network of its southern
neighbour, Mexico, during the reign of
President Felipe Calderon, it also hacked
into the 86,000 SMS messages of his heir
Enrique Pena Neta.
The US is battling with diplomatic
embarrassments after leakage of how the
NSA works. Brazil president Dilma
Rousseff cancelled a visit to the US and
launched scathing attacks against the
Obama government after revelation of
how extensively the Americans were
monitoring her country.
Edward Snowden
The latest country to protest is France
which summoned the US ambassador in
Paris over the huge scale of American
spying on French citizens.
Ktn

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