Leaked report exposes Houthi spying on Yemenis to carry out crimes and assassinations
From the conflicts on the ground over cyberspace, Houthi violations against the Yemeni people are on the rise, while the militias reject any peace attempts and break the truce, as they are currently trying through the Internet to control the conditions of citizens and violate their privacy to carry out crimes, assassinations and violations.
A new leaked report by Yemen International Telecommunication Company (TeleYemen), the exclusive operator of international telecommunications and internet services in Yemen, revealed exploitation by Houthi militias and their conflict of wings to employ this sector to enrich and spy on opponents.
The report, titled “Discover the smuggling of international calls received through the fixed phone network outside the framework of the TeleYemen network”, reveals for the first time Houthi groups that exploit official and private companies to raise funds and track down opponents; An intelligence espionage system was designed to target legitimate leaders and coup opponents under the so-called High Coordination Committee for Combating Smuggling, led by the so-called “Minister of Communications and Information Technology” in the coup government, Al-Nomeir Mosfer.
The report includes an account of the official entities subject to the Houthis in Sana’a. The employment of the so-called “Security and Intelligence” organization exposes the military and security capabilities of the Communications Company, as it shows that the so-called “Security and Intelligence Service” of the Houthi militias has constructed what it calls a “security interception network” aimed at “spying on the phone calls of all the officials of the internationally recognized government” and its high-ranking leadership.
The report said: Houthi influentials exploit the intelligence apparatus’s interconnection with telecommunications companies for eavesdropping, passing smuggled international calls away from TeleYemen and sharing that money among their interlocutors at ICMC.
He continued: The Houthi militias arrested a security expert in international communications in 2017, fabricated charges against him for smuggling international calls and forced him to spy on voice communications using the fixed phone network of the General Telecommunications Corporation, which is controlled by the militias.
He also showed that the Houthi-controlled company was monitoring and spying “professionally and through government exchanges”, providing all the technical requirements and means to intercept and follow up what it described as “suspicious calls”, in exchange for the Houthis’ easing of international phone calls that had incurred significant losses, officially legalizing militia spying and military use of communications.
The Yemeni Communications and Internet Company pays the team of the so-called “Security and Intelligence Agency” 1.6 billion riyals annually in the form of its work in combating “smuggling calls,” before it becomes clear that it is committing a crime itself, while the Houthi intelligence system smuggles international calls using the phone network numbers of 630 channels, passing hundreds of thousands of minutes daily.
Promoting the smuggling and espionage offense “will affect the company’s relationship with international labor partners, which could lead to a freeze on payments owed to the company, amounting to $180 million annually, in addition to the risks of challenging the company’s complicity in supporting the war effort”, the report said.
The expert report on Yemen submitted to the Security Council last January indicated that the team had asked Yemen’s TeleYemen to clarify the Houthis’ exploitation of the national scope of the “Ye” level of control, but at the time it claimed that “content sorting is used to protect children,” revealing the existence of a hidden and systematic war against Yemenis with military, security, economic, legal and social repercussions.
