Security News > 2011 > February > Hackers Build Android Encryption Apps For Egypt

http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2011/02/10/hackers-build-android-encryption-apps-for-egypt/ By Andy Greenberg The Firewall Forbes.com Feb. 10 2011 Cellphones may be helping to connect and organize the pro-democracy protesters massing in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria. But they’re also offering a new method for authoritarians to track those protesters and monitor their communications. So one company, Whisper Systems, is releasing a new way for Egyptians to thwart wiretaps on their smartphones. On Thursday, it launched an Egypt-specific version of two applications for Android devices: RedPhone, an encrypted voice-over-Internet calling app, and TextSecure, which encrypts users’ text messages. The Egyptian versions of the apps are available at Whispersys.com. “When the protests started in Egypt, we stepped up our efforts to get it working there,” says a well-known hacker and spokesperson for Whisper who goes by the name Moxie Marlinspike. “Now we’re ready to release, and hopefully enable some pro-democracy advocates to communicate and coordinate without being surveilled.” Cellphone carriers in Egypt haven’t admitted to monitoring Egyptian protesters in the recent unrest or handing over their data to the government. But a Vodafone official in 2009 confessed that Vodafone was legally required to give up data on a group of Egyptian dissidents in 2008 who had pulled down a large poster of president Hosni Mubarak. Last week the Vodafone said that it had been forced by the Egyptian government to use its network to send out propaganda text messages to users. And when I asked the carrier if it was giving up users’ data, it responded only that it had “already made made a number of statements in relation to the situation in Egypt facing all of the mobile operators” and would “not comment on national security measures.” [...]

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http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2011/02/10/hackers-build-android-encryption-apps-for-egypt/