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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.

Post je objavljen 20.08.2014. u 09:18 sati.