ip camera system
20.08.2014., srijeda
Years of surveillance and harassment
Years of surveillance and harassment Surveillance is not new to Tadesse. Up to 2009 he had been living in Addis Ababa where he and his wife were already politically active before the May 2005 network camera elections. During these elections his wife, then a member of the opposition party Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD), was elected to the Addis Ababa city council. The elections however ended in protests because of alleged rigging of the elections by the ruling party, and the demonstrations were broken up with considerable violence. Scores of people died and opposition supporters were arrested throughout the country on charges of seeking to overthrow the government. Under pressure from the authorities, Tadesse’s wife gave up her seat and years of harassment by those in power followed. Both Tadesse and his wife continuously received warnings, were being monitored, and repeatedly jailed without being charged and then released after a few days. Over the course of 2006 and 2007 Kersmo was beaten up three times. An employee of state-owned telecommunications company Ethio Telecom informed Tadesse that the phones of16channel dvr opposition members, including his phone, were being tapped. FinSpy and the targeting of Ethiopian opposition After coming to the UK in 2009, they enjoyed the freedom to be politically active in the Ginbot 7 Movement for Justice Freedom and Democracy (Ginbot 7), an Ethiopian opposition party in exile that has been labelled as a terrorist organisation by the Ethiopian government as part of their crackdown on political opposition. The use of the overbroad and vague anti-terrorism laws to crack down on peaceful critics, journalists and political opposition in Ethiopia has been roundly condemned by Human Rights Watch. It was when Tadesse was in the UK that he read reports of the Citizen Lab of the University of Toronto on politically motivated spying in Ethiopia. After reading the report, Kersmo and fellow Ginbot 7 members became concerned their computers might be infected with malware as well. Citizen Lab previously had reported that a FinSpy command and control server, which is indispensable for the use of FinSpy, was located in Ethiopia. Another Citizen Lab report revealed that Ginbot 7 members in particular were the 8 channel dvr targets of malware attacks that used pictures of senior members of Ginbot 7 as bait to download what was actually a Trojan called FinSpy. |