In a statement issued on 18 September, the Ministry of Interior denied contracting Systems Engineering of Egypt (SEE), a local cyber-security company, to monitor social media networks and other online communication platforms. Last week, the news media site BuzzFeed reported that SEE, a sister company of the US-based cyber-security firm Blue Coat, submitted a bid to the Interior Ministry to provide the Egyptian government with surveillance services to comb through data transmitted via Skype, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, WhatsApp and Viber applications. According to BuzzFeed, Egypt has been using surveillance systems that allow officials to loosely monitor local networks, but SEE would for the first time give the government access to Deep Packet Inspection technology that allows geolocation, tracking, and extensive monitoring of internet traffic. The Interior Ministry's statement repudiated the claim. “This news item is completely false,” it said. Since the BuzzFeed article was widely circulated by local news outlets, the statement also rebuked the media for publishing news whose aim, it said, was to “shake the people's confidence in the Interior Ministry” at a time when so many “challenges are facing Egypt.” According to Major General Abdel-Fattah Othman, assistant interior minister for media affairs, the ministry hasn't yet contracted any company to develop or install software for electronic surveillance. If plans exist they have not been implemented. But BuzzFeed quoted the CEO of SEE Egypt Ali Mineisi as saying, “Our job as a company is to train the government to run the programme.” He also said they had been contracted to provide Egypt's State Security with the system and teach officials how to comb through data gathered from email accounts and social media sites. Buzzfeed also quoted an unnamed Interior Ministry official as saying the ministry would be monitoring interactions or conversations it finds “worrying,” such as conversations between Islamists or those involving “debauchery” or “homosexual acts.” However, contradicting Meneisi's statement, Abdel-Rahman Al-Sawi, SEE president, said on his Facebook page a day later that his company “has nothing to do” with providing surveillance technologies to the Ministry of Interior or training its staff. SEE also released a statement this week, stating, “The company has neither supplied, installed nor participated in a tender to supply the Interior Ministry with any system. The company has not trained or participated in training ministry staff to use any applications, systems or devices with the aim of monitoring, surveillance, tapping or tracing communications or messages on social networks, whether produced by Blue Coat or any other manufacturers.” Blue Coat, for its part, distanced itself from SEE, saying the company “has not responded, and does not intend to respond, to any tender for a social network monitoring operation in Egypt. SEE Egypt is a Blue Coat reseller, but is not otherwise affiliated with Blue Coat,” the company said in a statement issued this week. “SEE Egypt has assured us that they have not bid or resold Blue Coat products to the Egyptian government for any social network monitoring operation.” Ramy Raoof, an Egyptian technologist and human rights advocate, said the ministry did not completely deny such plans. “If you check the ministry's statement, it mentions that the ‘contract is not signed yet' and that ‘the ministry didn't start running the system till now'. On the other hand, Blue Coat have been involved in surveillance practices, assisting governments in committing rights and privacy violations. “According to the Egyptian company's website, it has been involved in different bids and contracts with the ministry for a long time. SEE also shut down their website for a few hours following the release of Buzzfeed report giving themselves time to think of how to respond,” Raoof said. In the last few months the Interior Ministry had announced that was monitoring social networking websites. It arrested suspects who had set up Facebook pages used to incite violence against the police and the armed forces, who have been targeted by militant groups since the violent dispersal of a Muslim Brotherhood sit-in in August last year. Nevertheless, the unnamed Interior Ministry official told Buzzfeed that the current mandate is “much broader.” “We know from the research we have done that the Egyptian government does practice surveillance. This means they already have some tools but they lack greater sophistications,” Raoof said. In June, a leaked document caused an uproar among Internet users in Egypt. The document revealed that the Egyptian government was looking for a sophisticated new tool to monitor its citizens' social media and Internet activities. It all began when Al-Watan newspaper published, three months ago, a document pertaining to the Interior Ministry's plan to impose an “electronic grip” on Internet activity. The decision to impose surveillance on social media such as Twitter and Facebook, on both computers and mobiles, was understood by online activists as yet another sign that the government intends to stifle all forms of dissent. Mohamed Fouad, spokesman of 6 April Movement, said that such a procedure amounts to gagging dissidents. “It is a return to a worse state than Mubarak's era of suppression. The ministry is committing a crime in order to prevent another crime. Even if you have terrorists, get judiciary permission to monitor them,” Fouad said, stressing that the imposition of an ‘electronic grip' contravenes Article 57 of the Constitution. Egypt has no laws regulating the use of digital information or online privacy. Article 57 of the newly passed 2014 Constitution, however, states: “The right to privacy shall not be violated, shall be protected and not be infringed upon. Postal, telegraphic and electronic correspondences, telephone calls, and other means of communication are inviolable, and their confidentiality is guaranteed. They should not be confiscated, revealed or monitored except by virtue of a reasoned judicial order, for a definite period, and only in the cases defined by law. The state shall protect the citizens' right to use all forms of public means of communications. Interrupting or disconnecting them, or depriving the citizens of using them arbitrarily is impermissible. This shall be regulated by law.” According to Othman, “The ministry follows up internet crimes through its Computer Crimes Combat Department, which is responsible for keeping track of crimes inside and outside Egypt with enhanced technological ways.” He added that due to the rise in the electronic crime rate, the ministry is in the process of drafting a new law aimed at tougher punishments for the perpetrators. Activists perceive the government's attempt to monitor social media networks, which played a vital role in the 25 January Revolution that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak, as a step to cow the opposition into enforced consent, and so they have been sharing preventive measures and practices. According to Raoof, “The core of those practices is based on encryption since it maintains everyone's privacy. For mobiles, it is essential to disable service providers, including mobile network companies and social media companies, from accessing your private information. “It is better to replace WhatsApp with TextSecure and Viper with Redphone, to encrypt their online text and phone calls respectively. While on computers, we recommend using TOR browser, which helps prevent traffic analysis and maintain privacy.”
