New Delhi: Documents accessed by Reuters have revealed that Israel’s Cognyte Software Ltd won a tender to sell intercept software to Myanmar’s state-backed telecommunications firm a month before the February 2021 military coup. This deal was finalised despite Israel’s claim that it no longer makes defence technology transfers to Myanmar after a 2017 Israeli Supreme Court ruling.
This software gives the authorities purchasing it the power to hear calls, read text messages and emails, follow other web activity and track user location.
These details, according to Reuters, have come forward in a recent complaint to Israel’s attorney general by Israeli human rights lawyer Eitay Mack and disclosed on Sunday (January 15). “The complaint was filed on behalf of more than 60 Israelis, including a former speaker of the house as well as prominent activists, academics and writers,” Reuters said.
The 2017 Supreme Court ruling was subject to a rare gag order and the media is not allowed to cite it, but government officials have publicly claimed many times that defence exports from Myanmar are banned, Reuters reported.
Mack’s complaint demands a criminal investigation into Cognyte’s deal with Myanmar Posts and Telecommunications (MPT), and accuses the Israeli company as well as unnamed defence and foreign ministry officials who supervise such deals of “aiding and abetting crimes against humanity in Myanmar”.
The complainants have attached documents about the deal provided to Mack by rights group Justice for Myanmar, including a January 2021 letter from MPT to local regulators saying Cognyte was the winning vendor for intercept technology and the purchase order was issued “by 30th Dec 2020”.
Representatives for Cognyte, Myanmar’s military government and MPT did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment. Neither did two Japanese companies that have stakes in MPT.
In the past, cybersecurity experts have said that Myanmar’s junta uses technology of this kind without adequate safeguards to protect human rights.
Meanwhile, a report from former top United Nations officials has said that Myanmar’s government is able to manufacture a range of weapons to use against its own people because companies from at least 13 countries continue to supply raw materials.
Though sanctions exist to isolate the junta government, companies from the US, France, India and Japan are among those who make it easier for Myanmar to continue to manufacture weapons, BBC has quoted the report as saying.
“Myanmar has never been attacked by a foreign country,” Yanghee Lee, the UN’s former Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, and one of the report’s authors, told BBC. “And Myanmar does not export any arms. Since 1950, it’s made its own arms to use against its own people.”