Ethiopia must be held accountable in the United States for an illegal malware and digital spying attack on an American citizen, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told a federal appeals court Monday in a case where a foreign government claims it is immune from liability for wiretapping a man’s Skype calls.
Washington DC - infoZine - Malicious digital surveillance and malware attacks against perceived political opponents, dissidents, and journalists have become all-too-common tactics used by governments with poor human rights records, such as Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, and Vietnam. When foreign governments carry out these digital attacks on Americans in their homes, violating our wiretapping and privacy laws, their victims must be allowed to take them to court, EFF and its co-counsels said in a filing at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit......See More
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EFF: American Illegally Wiretapped at Home by Ethiopian Government Deserves His Day in Court27/10/2016 Malware Attack Highlights Troubling Outbreak of State-Sponsored Digital Spying
Washington, D.C.—Ethiopia must be held accountable in the United States for an illegal malware and digital spying attack on an American citizen, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) told a federal appeals court today in a case where a foreign government claims it is immune from liability for wiretapping a man’s Skype calls. Malicious digital surveillance and malware attacksagainst perceived political opponents, dissidents, and journalists have become all-too-common tactics used by governments with poor human rights records, such as Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, and Vietnam. When foreign governments carry out these digital attacks on Americans in their homes, violating our wiretapping and privacy laws, their victims must be allowed to take them to court, EFF and its co-counsels said in a filing at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. EFF, Robins Kaplan LLP, and Guernica 37: International Justice Chambers represent a Maryland man whose home computer was infected by state-sponsored malware known as FinSpy. The program recorded his private Skype calls, monitored his web searches and emails, and tracked his family’s use of the computer for weeks. Forensic analysis showed the information was surreptitiously sent to a secret server located in Ethiopia and controlled by the Ethiopian government. EFF’s client is an Ethiopian by birth who is a U.S. citizen and has worked with other members of the Ethiopian diaspora. The courts have allowed him to use the pseudonym Mr. Kidane to protect himself and his family from retaliation........See More Ian Derry was shocked when he got the news. A group of men had ransacked his company’s factory and burned down several buildings. A decade of work, tonnes of produce, tens of millions of dollars invested in equipment – it was all gone in the span of a few hours.
Derry is the director of africaJUICE, a Dutch company whose fruit processing plant in Ethiopia was one of almost a dozen factories attacked during the most recent outburst of protests by the Oromo ethnic group. Now foreign agri-businesses like his face a tough choice: stay, despite the risk, or leave and lose their investment. “We are still assessing the damage but the losses are massive,” says Derry. Since its launch in 2009, the company had grown its staff in Ethiopia to around 2,000 people and was bustling year-round with workers picking and processing passion fruit and mango. Now the plant looks like the set of a dystopian film. Rows of brand-new tractors are charred and unusable. The walls are black with soot and the ground is covered in dried-out juice and smashed computers. “No one could have seen this coming,” says Derry......See More Foreign tourists in Ethiopia are not expected to notify anyone in order to travel and visit attractions sites in the country, the Attorney General of the Federation, Getachew Ambaye has said.
The country has witnessed a surge in anti-government protests that resulted in the declaration of a six-month state of emergency on October 8. The situation led to restriction of movements even for foreign diplomats in the country. The state affiliated Fana Broadcasting Corporate however quotes Ambaye as saying, “The directive is not applicable to foreign tourists who come to Ethiopia to visit tourist destinations. They can travel from place to place freely as usual.”......See More ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia — Ethiopia's best-selling magazine says it is terminating its print edition because the state of emergency the government imposed this month is making regular publication "impossible."
The Addis Standard said Tuesday it has become increasingly difficult to operate during the state of emergency, which has restricted some rights and given security forces the power to detain suspects without court orders. The magazine announced the news "with a sense of unease" on Facebook but hinted that it will continue posting articles on its website. The Addis Standard recently published a series of articles criticizing Ethiopia's government for its handling of the Oromo protests that began in November 2015. The anti-government protests have widened to other regions. The Committee to Protect Journalists calls Ethiopia one of the world's 10 "most censored countries."......See More When 26-year-old Ethiopian Feyisa Lilesa crossed his wrists at the finish line as he took second place in the marathon at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, Mohammed Ademo knew it was a moment he had to seize.
Ademo, a journalist based in Washington DC, had for years strived to tell the world about the issues faced by his people, the Oromo, in Ethiopia. In 2008, he founded OPride, a website aimed at telling the stories of the growing Oromo diaspora and advocating for social justice in Ethiopia. In 2011, with the site’s readership growing, he went to study at the Columbia Journalism School, not because he wanted to become a journalist, but because he understood the power of the media as a tool to advocate for the Oromo cause......See More Ethiopia could be headed for largescale ethnic strife that would have negative repercussions to the region despite the state of emergency and top government officials saying the grievances are being addressed.
Thousands of ethnic Tigrayans belonging to the ruling class are being evicted in the northwestern Amhara region in the protests that began in November 2015 in Oromiya region over land boundaries. The protests have assumed a political dimension and are spreading to Amhara region. The biggest concern is that Ethiopia's instability will kill counter terrorism programmes against al-Shabaab. The country is not only a major player in the African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom), but the leading Western ally in the war against terror in The Horn.......See More Hundreds of members of Ethiopia's ethnic communities have marched in Perth to raise awareness of a government crackdown leading to the detention of thousands of people.
Authorities in Ethiopia have detained more than 2,000 people in recent weeks, amid large anti-government protests. President of the Oromo Community in Perth Nuru Said has called on the Australian Government to put pressure on its Ethiopian counterpart..... See More When protesters torched a nearby Dutch-run farm in Ethiopia's Oromia region, Marc Driessen watched anxiously as smoke billowed above the horizon, fearing his own business would meet the same fate.
"I was really terribly scared because I saw AfricaJuice burning from our farm and we were getting noise from people that most likely our farm would be next," he told AFP from his flower farm, Maranque, which boasts recently installed solar panels worth 600,000 euros ($650,000)......See More New York (TADIAS) — An event organized by the Manhattan- based Amnesty International volunteer group, which is free and open to the public, is scheduled on the evening of Monday, October 24th at the New York Society of Ethical Culture to spotlight Ethiopia’s current political and humanitarian crisis.
Steve Latimer, coordinator of the Amnesty volunteer group, says they hope to bring wider attention in the U.S. to the continuing violence and governance issues in Ethiopia. “With the events of the last couple of months, the recent killings during the protest, and the things that has happened since, we are very concerned about human rights violations by the Ethiopian government,” Latimer said. “And this discussion hopes to help educate some people at least in the United States about the situation in Ethiopia, which as you well know not many people in this country are aware of.” Latimer, who is a retired civil rights lawyer and a human rights activist, told Tadias that Amnesty International will also push at the gathering for the approval of the U.S. Senate resolution on Ethiopia “condemning the lethal violence against protesters, journalists, and others in civil society for exercising their rights under Ethiopia’s constitution.”.••••••See More |
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