Microsoft Training May Have Helped Tunisian Regime To Spy On Citizens

An anonymous reader writes "A document released in the recent Cablegate leak reveals that Microsoft provided training to the Tunisian Ministries of Justice and the Interior in exchange for exemption from the country's open software policy. These Ministries would soon put the training to use by phishing for the social networking credentials of bloggers, reporters, political activists and protesters. Microsoft's assistance resulted in the sale of 12,000 software licenses to the Tunisian government." The cable itself details the effort Microsoft put into negotiating a deal. Their clear intent was simply expanding into a new market, but the author of the cable was skeptical of the Tunisian government's adherence to its stated goals. Quoting: "In theory, increasing GOT law enforcement capability through IT training is positive, but given heavy-handed GOT interference in the internet, Post questions whether this will expand GOT capacity to monitor its own citizens."

Maybe it's more than that; it's their CA

[rtfa-troll]

Can anyone knowledgable comment? There are quite a few articles around saying that the key thing that MS did was to put in a certificate for the Tunisian Government in Windows / Internet explorer which let them intercept any domain they wanted to; See this posting in Scribd [scribd.com]. If that's true it's a much more serious betrayal of their users by Microsoft.

In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

GE power turbine used to energize torture cables

Caterpillar tractor harvested crops to feed dictator

Re:Maybe it's more than that; it's their CA

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Maybe state CAs are swapped in according to localization; or I suck at finding them; but I didn't manage to locate any such cert in an EN-US win7 machine. I don't, of course, have any access to whatever localization Tunisian systems would be using.