Surveillance in Bangladesh - RAB seeking purchase of mobile phone spy tool

This is the second in the series of reports published in New Age about surveillance in Bangladesh. This was originally published on 2 November 2014

You can access all five of the articles from this page
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RAB seeking to purchase powerful mobile phone spy tool 

David Bergman

The Rapid Action Battalion is seeking to purchase a powerful mobile spy tool which can obtain details of all mobile phone numbers operating in a particular locality, according to a UK based privacy right organisation, Privacy International, which has published a copy of the procurement document on its website.
Known as an ‘IMSI catcher’, the equipment masquerades as a mobile phone base station and logs the telephone numbers of all the mobile phones in a particular area.
‘[IMSI] Catchers allow [law enforcement authorities] to indiscriminately gather data from thousands of mobile phones in a specific area and at public events such as political demonstrations,’ the Privacy International website states.
IMSI stands for International Mobile Subscriber Information.
The international non-governmental organisation is lobbying the Swiss government authorities to prevent a company, NeoSoft, from exporting the surveillance equipment to Bangladesh so that, ‘RAB’s capacity to engage in indiscriminate violence’ is not ‘augmented with indiscriminate surveillance technology.’
‘Such a technology in the hands of an agency as reportedly unaccountable as the RAB is extremely concerning,’ it said.

The government and the arrest of RAB officers

In a number of recent articles - here and here - I have written about the different way in which Bangladesh's High Court dealt with cases involving extra judicial killings in 2006 and 2009 on the one hand and 2014 on the other - and also the state's different response.

Whilst in the 2006 and 2009, for one reason or the other, the cases basically went nowhere, the situation was different in 2014 - with one court ordering the establishment of an inquiry committee into the Narayanganj killings and another court directing the arrest of three RAB officers who were allegedly involved in the deaths.

One article on the different judicial approaches is set out below - along with links to the four orders. It should be noted of course, that  the risk of the application of Bangladesh's Contempt of Court laws does circumscribe what would otherwise be instructive and useful analysis.

The Government and the RAB arrests
However, another interesting aspect of the 2014 recent High Court orders - and in particular the one relating to the arrest of the RAB officers - was how the prime minister and law minister responded.

RAB, party hypocrisy and impunity

An op-ed article I recently wrote for New Age about Rapid Action Battalion's extra judicial killings (also reproduced below) drew heavily on four reports written by Human Rights Watch - and I would highly recommend anyone interested in Rapid Action Batallion to read them. Local human rights organizations - Ain-o-Salish Kendra and Odhikar - have also done fine work on RAB, and conducted many investigations; but in these four reports HRW has summarised the case against RAB, and summarised their     investigations into an easily accessible form. 

The four reports are:
2006 - Judge, Jury, and Executioner: Torture and Extrajudicial Killings by Bangladesh’s 
           Elite Security
2011 - 'Crossfire': Continued Human Rights Abuses by Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion

2013 - Blood on the Streets: The Use of Excessive Force During Bangladesh Protests 

2014 - Democracy in the Crossfire: Opposition Violence and Government Abuses in the 2014 
           Pre- and Post- Election Period in Bangladesh