Intercept: Middle East countries buy Chinese devices to spy on their citizens

A Chinese technology company has been selling surveillance and spy equipment to a number of countries in the Middle East and North Africa that have repeatedly violated human rights and curbed freedoms, Intercept reported.

The site says in a survey that China's Semptian has been using US technology since 2015 to help develop monitoring and monitoring equipment, and then sells it to governments of countries under the guise of a fictitious company called EyeNext.

Simptian, in collaboration with IBM and Shilinks, the leader of the chip industry, is developing a new generation of precision data processing devices to enable computers to analyze a large amount of data faster.

The report says the Chinese company is a member of Open Power, an organization founded by executives from Google and IBM to stimulate creativity and innovation.

Violation and suppression
Intersect quoted Xu Wenning, an employee at Semptian, as saying in an email in April that his company was selling spy devices to Iran and Syria.

The site, however, claims that Simpetian is apparently ready to deal with other Middle Eastern and North African countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Morocco, the UAE, Oman, Sudan and Egypt, where governments routinely violate human rights and suppress freedom of expression and peaceful protest.

China's ruling communist regime secretly uses Simptian equipment to monitor the Internet and mobile phones of nearly 200 million of its citizens, inspecting its contents from personal data and then sorting it out every day.

The company's activity extends beyond China, and in recent years has begun to market its technology globally.

The spy device, which the company sells in the size of a small travel bag, can be placed secretly in the back of the car. Once it is activated, it starts monitoring hundreds of mobile phones in the surrounding area and then starts recording and unloading text messages.

The device is one of many of Semipetian's spy tools sold to "authoritarian" governments in the Middle East and North Africa, Intercept quoted two sources familiar with the company's operations.

Monitoring and control
In an e-mail, an employee at Chinese company Ryan Gallagher told Intersput that Simptian had provided security equipment in the Middle East and North Africa with surveillance equipment, but installed a collective monitoring and control system in an unnamed country, helping to set up an "electronic trap" for all its citizens.

The AIGIS system is designed to monitor the uses of telephones and the Internet. It can "store and analyze unlimited data, and show the connections made by everyone" according to company documents.

According to the US site report, Western police and intelligence services have for years been using similar equipment. Thanks to companies such as Simpetian, this technique has increasingly found its way into the security forces of "undemocratic" countries, where it "puts protesters in prison, is tortured, and in some cases executed."