Matthew Vella - A major Israeli telecommunications company is to provide the Malta Security Services (MSS) the technology for its lawful interception system, in a controversial contract award which has landed the Malta Communications Authority in court.

New York-based Verint Systems, a subsidiary of Comverse Technology, was chosen late December 2005 by the MCA to provide an interception system for the MSS.

Concerns over the choice of Verint have sparked alarm over its parent company’s notorious link to a major espionage investigation after the September 11 attacks, raising eyebrows over the company that will have its eyes and ears on practically all Malta’s emails, and mobile telephony and VoIP exchanges.

Rival bidder RCS, which presented the cheapest offer, is suing the MCA for having refused it an appeal on the contract decision. RCS’s interception equipment has been previously used in uncovering the recent Calciopoli fraud scandal which rocked Italy’s football scene.

Among the list of witnesses that RCS’s lawyers have asked to testify over MCA’s tender process are the authority’s lawyer David Gonzi, Joe Demajo from the Demajo Group over the company’s relations with Verint, and Melanie Gonzi Balzan Demajo – wife to David Gonzi – to testify if she had ever offered any consultancy services to Verint, or whether she represented Verint in discussions with MCA.

Parent company Comverse, which has close links to the Israeli government, was suspected to have been used by Israeli military spies who had been monitoring al Qaeda terror suspects prior to September 11, without informing the US government of their actions.

Some of the spies, which had been working at Comverse, would have allegedly used the company’s interception system to tip off suspects of the actions of US counter-terrorism investigators. According to a report compiled by the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), American intelligence services had serious concerns over the vulnerability of the computer equipment which provides interception systems for US lawmen.

According to the report, the system was prone to interception by unauthorised, non-law enforcement parties because Comverse had continued access to the system. And that’s why similar concerns are being expressed about Malta’s interception system which will be leased out by Verint, rather than sold, meaning the company will retain access to the computer systems so they can service the network and keep it free from glitches.

Comverse was implicated in an espionage saga that received little attention in the US, except for the pursuit by Fox News and Le Monde, who reported the existence of a 60-page document suggesting that Israeli spies held information on the September 11 suspects which they did not share with the US.

After the attacks in New York, more than 60 Israelis were detained by law enforcement agencies who broke a ring of military spies acting under cover of being “art students” who had targeted military bases, the DEA, FBI, secret offices and unlisted private homes of law enforcement and intelligence personnel, claiming to be selling their “artwork”.

But under investigation, many of them turned out to be young military officials specialising in military intelligence and electronic surveillance interception, including one bodyguard to the head of the Israeli army and even the son of a two-star Israeli general.Investigators suspected the Israelis had gathered intelligence about the September 11 attacks in advance, and not shared it with the US government.

Le Monde said more than one third of the suspected Israeli spies had lived in Florida, where at least 10 of the 19 Arabs involved in the September 11 attacks also lived – the source of suspicions that the Israeli “students” had been tracking al Qaeda terrorists without informing the US government.

About six of the 60 detained suspects worked for Comverse – and investigators feared information generated by this firm had fallen into the wrong hands and had the effect of impeding the September 11 terror inquiry. According to the DEA report, terrorist suspects had been tipped off about the actions of counter-terrorism investigators, who feared their own hunt for the suspects had been rumbled because their actions were known beforehand, by knowing when investigators are calling on the telephone.

Suspicion fell upon Amdocs, an Israeli-based telecommunications company which has contracts with the 25 biggest phone companies in America. Amdocs practically generates a record on every single telephone call made in the US.

The FBI had already conducted investigations on Amdocs over security breaches after it suspected that records of calls in the US were falling into the hands of Israel. Concerns about the vulnerability of the system operated by Amdocs grew because of a 1997 drug trafficking case in Los Angeles in which telephone information was used to compromise the communications of the FBI.

Investigators feared that suspects may have been tipped off to what they were doing by information leaking out of Amdocs. But there was equal concern over Comverse, which was founded in Israel, and which provides the US government with its eavesdropping technology.

Senior government officials were concerned that unauthorised non-law enforcement parties were obtaining access to the Comverse computer, and conducting their own unauthorised interception.

That’s because Comverse had continuing access to the computers so they could service them. While this access made wiretapping easier, it led to a system that became vulnerable to compromise because Comverse programs could be intercepted by unauthorised parties.

The suspicions however increased since Comverse works closely with the Israeli government, and gets reimbursed for up to 50 per cent of its research and development costs by the ministry of industry and trade.

Counter-terrorism investigators started fearing that suspects they wanted to wiretap had been already been tipped off, and changed their telecommunications processes and act differently as soon as the supposedly secret wiretaps went kicked into action.

The roots of the suspicions harked back to 1997, in the bust-up of a major Israeli organised crime network trafficking cocaine and ecstasy. According to investigators, criminals had access to a database through which they got the phone numbers of investigating officers, using them to avoid arrest.

Investigators suspected Amdocs because it generates data for virtually every call in America, fearing the firm’s data was getting into the wrong hands. When investigators checked their own wiretapping system for leaks, they grew concerned about vulnerabilities in the computers that intercept, record and store the wiretapped calls – a main contractor was Comverse Infosys.