A US citizen nicknamed "Mr. Kidane" to protect his family still residing in Ethiopia, has filed a lawsuit against the Ethiopian government over the installation of a government-grade spyware on his laptop, said a report on tech blog Boing Boing. Backed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Kidane has filed the case in the U.S. District Court in Washington, DC, and is seeking a jury trial with damages for violating the state privacy law and the U.S. Wiretap Act.
EFF Staff Attorney Nate Cardozo spoke on behalf of Kidane and the US, who said, "We have clear evidence of a foreign government secretly infiltrating an American's computer in America, listening to his calls, and obtaining access to a wide swath of his private life. The current Ethiopian government has a well-documented history of human rights violations against anyone it sees as political opponents. Here, it wiretapped a United States citizen on United States soil in an apparent attempt to obtain information about members of the Ethiopian diaspora who have been critical of their former government. U.S. laws protect Americans from this type of unauthorized electronic spying, regardless of who is responsible."
According to a forensic examination of Kidane's laptop purportedly overseen by EFF, his computer had been infected with a hidden malware. The malware was reportedly discovered by opening a Microsoft Word document file, which was an attachment to an email message deemed to have been sent by Ethiopian government agents to Kidane. The malware was also learned to have been a British surveillance software suite called FinSpy, which recorded an array of activities done on Kidane's laptop, which include Skype call recordings, which were then sent to a secret control server controlled by the government of Ethiopia.
FF Legal Director Cindy Cohn said that at the end of the day, Kidane's case was arguably simple. "Yet despite the international intrigue and genuine danger involved in this lawsuit, at bottom it's a straightforward case. An American citizen was wiretapped at his home in Maryland, and he's asking for his day in court under longstanding American laws," Cohn stated.
