|
Matthew Vella
The floodgates appear to have opened for renewed challenges to the Malta Communications Authority’s decision that favoured Israeli spy firm Verint over a cheaper system offered by Italian firm RCS, this newspaper has learnt.
Malta’s telecoms operators are now reconsidering their obligations to pay for the unified legal interception system, which the MCA chose on behalf of the Malta Security Services (MSS).
They will also be considering suspending any further upgrades to their systems.
The reaction follows MaltaToday’s revelations two weeks ago of the legal action presented by RCS, which was denied the right to appeal the decision after the MCA claimed the contract was not bound by public procurement regulations since the contract was issued by the security services.
The interception system is believed to be worth anything between Lm1 to 2 million. But the award to a surveillance systems firm with close links to the Israeli government, and a trail of controversy spanning from the September 11 attacks and into Europe, have compounded the contentious choice of Verint to provide the MSS its unified legal interception system, that will tap into Malta’s telephone and internet communications.
Go Mobile, Maltacom and Vodafone each provide the Malta Security Services with legal interception technology to allow the MSS to tap all telephone calls. Internet operators are also expected to pay for the provision of the Israeli technology to the security services.
RCS, which is challenging the MCA’s decision in court, claims tenderers were never informed of a “dispensation” that exempted the contract from procurement laws.
The facts even point to a later agreement signed between the MCA and the security services – a week after RCS were told their offer had been rejected - on 5 January 2006, when the MCA signed a memorandum of understanding with the MSS, which is afforded special powers to spend money without having to account for its expenditure.
RCS is claiming the MCA’s decision was illegal and discriminatory, after it was informed on 29 December 2005 that its offers had been rejected and the contract assigned to Verint.
However, in a meeting held on 3 January 2006, the MCA informed RCS that its offer had been the cheapest and was also compliant and sound, but that Verint’s offer was “holistically superior”.
Two days later on 5 January, the authority signed its memorandum of understanding with the security services.
One of the main suspicions in RSC’s court application is that both the security services and Go Mobile already operate Verint’s legal interception system.
In his affidavit, RCS sales director Luca Crovato expressed his surprise at being informed by the MCA that Verint had sold to Go Mobile an upgrade on their lawful interception system.
Crovato speculated that since the legal interception system will be funded by network operators such as Go Mobile, “therefore what would have happened had the tender been awarded to RCS rather than Verint? Go Mobile would have acquired a solution that was not compatible and would have caused a problem in creating the fund necessary to pay the tender issued by MCA.”
Crovato argued that since the new interception system would be a single, unified system covering all operators, relieving operators from being responsible for their systems, “I do not believe that the ‘upgrade’ sold to Go Mobile was to be simply dismissed once the tender was awarded, but was to be ‘reused by Verint’… By reusing an upgrade, Verint was able to, de facto, change the scope of the supply for the tender.”
The 9-11 legacy
Part of the troubling aspect in the choice of Verint – formerly Comverse Infosys – is its implication in an international espionage saga involving Israeli spies which had been tracking the Al Qaeda terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks.
Following a far-reaching report by Fox News in January 2002, Comverse Infosys changed its name to Verint Systems Inc on 1 February 2002. As of 31 January 2005, approximately 59 per cent of Verint’s common stock was owned by Comverse Technology.
According to Le Monde, some 60 Israeli suspects – military spies parading as “art students” – were detained following the September 11 attacks, suspected of having tracked the 19 Arab terrorists who carried out the attacks without ever sharing their information with the US government.
Six of the suspects, linked with Mossad and also the Israeli general command, were employees of Comverse Infosys, which provided the US government with its eavesdropping technology. Others were employed with another Israeli firm, Amdocs.
A report by the Drug Enforcement Administration, seen by MaltaToday, collated dozens of interrogations it held with the Israeli spies. The DEA report says the spies “targeted and penetrated military bases”, including DEA, FBI and other secret officers and unlisted private homes of intelligence personnel, purporting to be art students selling their work.
When Fox News picked up on the report in early 2001, it claimed American terrorist investigators feared certain suspects in the September 11 attacks managed to stay ahead of them by knowing who and when investigators are calling on the telephone.
Suspicion fell upon Amdocs, an Israeli-based telecommunications company which has contracts with the 25 biggest phone companies in America, and which generates records on every single telephone call made in the US. Allegedly, the information had been used to inform suspects they were being watched by counter-terrorism officers.
The FBI had repeatedly conducted investigations on Amdocs over security breaches after it suspected that records of calls in the US were falling into the hands of the Israeli government. Suspicion had been rooted in a 1997 drug trafficking case in Los Angeles in which telephone information, the type that Amdocs collects, was used to “completely compromise the communications of the FBI, the Secret Service, the DEO and the LAPD.”
The crime syndicate was found in possession of investigating officers’ cell phones, and had used them to avoid arrest. When investigators tried to find out where the information might have come from, they looked at Amdocs. As investigators checked their own wiretapping system for leaks, they grew concerned about potential vulnerabilities in the computers that intercept, record and store the wiretapped calls. A main contractor was Comverse Infosys, which is reimbursed for up to 50 per cent of its research and development costs by Israel’s Ministry of Industry and Trade.
Comverse Infosys provided law enforcement with eavesdropping technology but also had continuing access to the computers so they can service them and keep them free of glitches. According to Fox News, Comverse Infosys’s software had a “back door” through which wiretaps themselves could be intercepted by unauthorised parties.
Investigations into Comverse Infosys were never fully carried out: Fox News reported investigators saying that even suggesting Israeli spying was considered career suicide, and that FBI inquiries into Comverse had been halted before the actual equipment was ever tested for leaks.
But the parent company is also mired in controversy: US prosecutors this week filed criminal charges against three former executives of Comverse over manipulation of stock options. They are its founder Kobi Alexander, and former chief executive David Kreinberg, and William F. Sorin, former corporate secretary. |
