Andy Müller-Maguhn, former spokesman for the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), reported on Sunday at the remote Chaos Communication Congress (rC3) of massive attempts at intimidation by state secret services. That the CIA was after him became obvious to him at the latest when he discovered after a repair that his encrypted communicating mobile phone had been bugged with an integrated eavesdropping module.

Professional “Paranoia” The hacker sits on the board of directors of the Wau-Holland Foundation and has several crucial Wikileaks publications in their archive like the video “Collateral Murder” from the Iraq war made available by Chelsea Manning. In recent years he has also visited the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange several times in his asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy and reported at the CCC congress last year about his monitoring there by the Spanish company Undercover Global.

For some years now, there have been increasing signs that he is being bugged and being shadowed at every turn, explained Müller-Maguhn in his lecture this year. Because of his professional “paranoia” he is very attentive to receiving the corresponding signals, the security expert stated. For example, he first noticed attacks on the encryption of his cell phone: it suddenly transmitted “a lot of data” and was often downgraded to 3G. This generation of cell phones is much easier to intercept than 4G or 5G.

Spontaneous VPNs and problems with PGP keys There were also increasing problems in the fixed network, explained the computer scientist. For example, strange transmission tunnels in the form of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) were set up when surfing the net. When encrypting emails with PGP, there were strange incidents with the keys, and the relevant environments of communication partners sometimes no longer worked. But all of this was comparatively harmless: “You can get used to it.”

According to Müller-Maguhn, things got more uncomfortable when he was pestered with numerous questions one day when entering Great Britain according to the pattern of how long he will stay in the country and where he wants to travel. At first he suspected that the security authorities wanted to create biometric voice samples of him. The officers didn’t even listen to him and after a while they started their list all over again. Apparently it was a pure delay tactic until a “team is ready to follow me”.

Cell phone with interception component received back This is how the 49 -year-old remembers intrusive observers when visiting a friend’s office. The shading has become more and more open and aggressive: cars followed him to his sleeping place, even though it was on a one-way street. While traveling to other countries, he noticed homeless beggars who were suddenly handling high-resolution cameras with a strong zoom.

One of the most striking things that Müller-Maguhn assesses is a physical error on his cryptophone, which he 2018 because of a defective display I had to send it in. The hacker designed the relevant, specially secured cell phones together with his CCC colleague Frank Rieger and other security experts through the company Society for Safe Mobile Communication (GSMK). The repaired device then waited with a third-party integrated crypto hardware along with its own flash memory and 800 – Mhz antenna.

Open mail and exchanged door locks The phone itself was five years old at the time, the eavesdropping components were from April 2013, the expert explained. It was not possible to determine when exactly the device was installed. It could have been installed even before the repair, with the corresponding effort. To do this, you need a procedure with several people and physical access to the cell phone. Everything looks like a tailor-made secret service operation in the form of a “tailored access”, even if it was probably a standard eavesdropping device.

His door lock was also changed, the cylinder removed, so that he did not come into his apartment, complained Müller-Maguhn: “You were in my room. You know what else I was doing.” Mail to Spanish lawyers had been opened – clearly recognizable.

Invasion of privacy For the Assange -Supporters are clear that they should be intimidated by the state. He sees the CIA at work, as its then boss Mike Pompeo identified Wikileaks 2017 as a “non-state enemy secret service”, “which is often from state Actors how Russia is fed “. The later US Secretary of State was particularly annoyed that the makers of the disclosure platform with the “Vault-7-Leaks” pilloried the CIA, also because of extensive hacking programs. 2018 had Pompeo put Wikileaks on a level with al-Qaeda, ISIS or Hezbollah.

How he escaped surveillance Müller-Maguhn is so far a mystery. Little can be achieved with lawyers, as there is no official legal case for them. It will also be difficult to arrest Pompeo. He would also like to indulge in the belief of many fellow human beings that everything is not so bad and that he should simply continue his “normal life”. The encroachments on his privacy are too deep for that. So if there was one more option left, he turned to the hacker community gathered in front of the screens: “I will become a farmer and you will solve the problem.”

(tiw)