In April 2010, the NSA and the GCHQ jointly established its Mobile Handset Exploitation Team (MHET) to target cell phones and the computer networks of both SIM manufacturers and telcos.
The Intercept wrote about one case in particular in which GCHQ used the X-KEYSCORE mass email interception system to target a Gemalto employee in Thailand because he was sending encrypted email. The article noted that there was no suggestion that the PGP encryption was broken.
The article noted that when contacted, Gemalto was oblivious to the infiltration outlined in the GCHQ slides. However Scahill later pointed out that, “Gemalto board member Alex Mandl was a founding trustee of the CIA-funded venture capital firm In-Q-Tel,” pouring doubt on its innocence in the matter.
A 2009 NSA document cited said that the GCHQ had assigned scores to individual email addresses in telecoms firms across the world based on how often they mentioned certain technical terms. Huawei employees were often given the highest scores followed by Ericsson and Nokia.
Personal Facebook usernames and passwords of Gemalto employees were acquired by GCHQ operatives.
In other words, the US and UK spies were focusing their efforts on innocent, technical engineers with no connection to terrorism just because they were a means to an end. Barack Obama’s claim that intelligence agencies were not spying on normal people who do not pose a threat to national security was obviously a lie.
TelecomAsia asked a dozen telecom operators across the region to ask how they were responding to the Gemalto GCHQ hack and only Telenor Myanmar was able to give a definitive reply that they did not use Gemalto SIM cards on their network.