Taliban could use computer data to track down Afghans
Many NGOs are concerned about the use of computer data by the Taliban.
Here, members of the group at Kabul international airport after the Americans had completely left on August 31, 2021. © AFP - WAKIL KOHSAR
Text by: Dominique Desaunay Follow
6 mins
Since the arrival of new power in Kabul, many NGOs fear that the Taliban will use computer data to track down the Afghans who have helped the coalition forces.
Beyond social networks, they could use databases established by the former power and by the United States, with sensitive information such as fingerprints or identity photos.
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Under
the aegis of the United States
, Afghanistan had largely equipped itself with telecommunications and digital infrastructures.
The government of Ashraf Ghani had implemented, for example, an electronic identity card including biometric data of its citizens in order to allow them to vote.
"
The Taliban will now probably have access to it,
" the NGO Human Rights First was already worried about when the group captured Kabul on August 15.
The highly sensitive HIIDE database in the hands of the Taliban
The Taliban would also have seized the device called HIIDE abandoned by the American forces.
The database stored by this system contains
sensitive information
such as fingerprints, retinal scans and identity photos of people who have contributed, directly or indirectly, with Western coalition forces.
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To read also
:
After the departure of the Americans, the Afghans go into exile towards Pakistan, the first destination of the refugees
The question now is whether this encrypted information will allow the Taliban to identify opponents of his regime or to set up a system of surveillance of the population.
"
It would be astonishing if the Taliban did not have the computer skills to be able to extract from these various files the information they would need, and it would be absolutely dramatic for the people on these files
", worries Nathalie Godard, director of the 'Action at Amnesty International France.
Taliban's handling of information from US databases to hunt down Afghans "would be absolutely dramatic"
Dominique desaunay
To escape, Afghans urged to erase their digital traces
To face the threat of a cyber-repression, the Afghans are invited by the NGOs and the giants of the American Web to erase their digital traces.
As such, the
Human Rights First foundation wrote a version in Pashtun and Dari of its
white paper “How to know your digital history”.
A document that had already been released, in 2020, this time to protesters in Hong Kong.
Another guide, on how to “counter” biometrics, has also just been published online.
In addition,
the
United Nations-backed "
Technology Against Terrorism
"
working group
announced that it considered all social media posts published by the
Afghan Taliban
as "
terrorist content
" and would be deleted. automatically by almost all of the major web platforms.
►
To read also:
Biometric data, an additional risk for Afghan collaborators of Westerners
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