Saudi Arabian Telecom Pitches to Moxie Marlinspike

An anonymous reader sent in this excerpt from Moxie Marlinspike's weblog: "Last week I was contacted by an agent of Mobily, one of two telecoms operating in Saudi Arabia, about a surveillance project that they're working on in that country. Having published two reasonably popular MITM tools, it's not uncommon for me to get emails requesting that I help people with their interception projects. I typically don't respond, but this one (an email titled 'Solution for monitoring encrypted data on telecom') caught my eye. ... The requirements are the ability to both monitor and block mobile data communication, and apparently they already have blocking setup. ... When they eventually asked me for a price quote, and I indicated that I wasn't interested in the job for privacy reasons, they responded with this: ' I know that already and I have same thoughts like you freedom and respecting privacy, actually Saudi has a big terrorist problem and they are misusing these services for spreading terrorism and contacting and spreading their cause that's why I took this and I seek your help. If you are not interested than maybe you are on indirectly helping those who curb the freedom with their brutal activities.'"

Comments

They should consult with the US Government,

[pecosdave]

our officials here have snooped on us in every way possible for years. When they can't figure out how to snoop (old Skype) they simply hire Microsoft to buy the company and add a back-door.

The Saudi's could learn a lot from us.

Saudi Arabia won''t last

[vikingpower]

The ruling al-Saud family will soon have to come with a follow-up for the current king. In the same time, a complete army of foreign experts & technicians is required to keep the entire Saudi infrastructure ( telco, roads, water supply, power generation ) running. Moreover, the Saudi government is continuously spying upon its citizens, as a habit. Women are slowly beginning to protest against the enormous discrimination and contempt they live under.

All of this taken together mixes up quite explosively. Mark my words: 25 years from now, Saudi Arabia as we know it will have gone down

Re:Dumbass.

[AlphaWolf_HK]

I think the western governments would be a bit more clever than that. They have the resources to develop their own home grown spying tools. They don't need an outside consultant, which is what this guy would have been. Otherwise you'd be hearing about this kind of stuff all the time.

Re:Dumbass.

[Anonymous Coward]

instead of doing real work that helps real people.

Are we talking about the same Moxie Marlinspike?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie_Marlinspike
Who wrote things like:
http://convergence.io/details.html
https://github.com/WhisperSystems/RedPhone
https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/
(aguably the most used encrypted communications apps for Android)
http://tack.io/
http://www.audioanarchy.org/
http://www.blueanarchy.org/
https://www.cloudcracker.com/

I could go on. Hell, I haven't even gotten to the talks he's done and the vulnerabilities he's disclosed.
Seriously, if you're that dismissive of Moxie Marlinspike, you MUST have cured a major disease or something. Please, do tell.

Fucktard

[Big Hairy Ian]

He didn't come running to slash dot he posted it to his blog! Someone else posted it to slash dot so take your foot out of your mouth and shove it back up your arse.

Saudi regime nurtures terrorism while attacking it

[Dogtanian]

That's nice, except that the issue with the Saudi regime *itself* is that it's as much a part of the problem of terrorism as it is of the solution. That is, it presents two different faces to the world- the one it likes to present to the West, and the one it likes to present to the Wahhabist elements within the country. They need to not merely tolerate, but pander to the latter in order to remain power.

(For those who didn't want to read the linked article, the tl;dr version is that Wahhabism is the Saudi-founded brand of Islam that Al-Qaeda et al espouse; if you've ever heard the term "Islamo-fascism", Wahhabism is the interpretation of Islam it's most likely referring to).

In other words, the Saudi regime is in the position of having to be blatantly two-faced about this; claiming to be cracking down on terrorism to their Western allies, while at the same time being one of the largest supporters of it.

Of course, the West knows this, but likes to pretend otherwise, because there's the inconvenient fact that they have lots of oil which we want. Regarding Western attitudes towards extremist Islamic terrorism, Saudi Arabia isn't merely the elephant in the room in the sense that it's a major factor- as the home and the heart of Wahhabism, it's arguably *the* central factor. Modern Saudi Arabia was *founded* on an agreement between Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab (the founder of Wahhabism) and the house of Saud to spread his teachings while the latter retained power. From Wikipedia:-

Upon arriving in Diriyya, a pact was made between Ibn Saud and Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab, by which Ibn Saud pledged to implement and enforce Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab's teachings, while Ibn Saud and his family would remain the temporal "leaders" of the movement.

Many of the alleged grievances of terrorists supporting Wahhabist organisations such as Al-Qaeda revolve around the supposed US "occupation" of Saudi Arabia. Yet, despite all this, you'll rarely hear Western politicians attack the Saudi regime for their covert tolerance of extremist elements. Why? See the start of this paragraph.