FOUR MILLION LINES OPEN: HOW EASY IT IS TO SPY ON YOU IN PAKISTAN
Focus= The Listening State
A dispatch from the Digital Intelligence Bureau
In Pakistan you do not need to be important to be heard. You only need a SIM card. The rest is plumbing, and the plumbing was installed years ago, paid for by the telecom companies themselves.
The machine with one button
In June 2024 the Islamabad High Court put the machine on paper. Hearing petitions over leaked private phone calls, Justice Babar Sattar recorded that telecom operators had been told by the PTA to “finance, import, and install” a Lawful Intercept Management System at a designated surveillance centre. From there, the order said, an agency “initiates a track and trace request through the click of a button” against any SIM or handset, and call records, SMS, metadata and even audio, video and web records flow to a monitoring centre “without any human intervention” (Dawn).
The scale: operators must keep up to 2% of their customers surveillable at once. The court’s rough estimate was that “over 4 million citizens” could be monitored at any given time (Dawn situationer).
The court also noted that the federal government said it had granted no agency permission under the Telegraph Act or Telecom Act to record calls, that no agency had ever sought a surveillance warrant under the Fair Trial Act, and that the system appeared to run “without any backing of law” (The News). It issued contempt notices to the PTA leadership.
Then the file went quiet. The government argued in the Supreme Court that the IHC had overstepped and that the restrictions hampered counter-terrorism work; the Supreme Court suspended the IHC’s orders and halted the proceedings in August 2024 (Express Tribune). Asked who was actually recording citizens’ calls, the state’s lawyer said it had “not yet been determined.” The leaks were real. The leaker, officially, is nobody.
The spy who sleeps next to you
The state is the loudest listener, not the closest. The Digital Rights Foundation reports that women in Pakistan repeatedly describe partners and family members installing monitoring apps on their phones to track movements, messages and social media (DRF). Stalkerware is sold as “parental control” and installed in five minutes by anyone who knows your unlock code.
Six digits to become you
The cheapest spy tool in the country is a phone call. The PTA has warned about the “courier” scam: someone claims a parcel needs confirmation and asks you to read back a code. That code is your WhatsApp registration OTP. Read it out and your account, your groups and your contacts’ trust now belong to someone else, who then asks your family for money (PTA; The Nation). The national CERT has published its own guide to protecting WhatsApp accounts (PKCERT).
How to be harder to hear
- Never read out or forward an OTP, to anyone, for any reason. No courier, bank or PTA officer needs it.
- Turn on WhatsApp two-step verification with a PIN and a recovery email.
- Use end-to-end encrypted apps for sensitive conversations; ordinary calls and SMS travel over the operator’s network.
- Lock your phone with a code nobody else knows, and check Settings for unknown apps with accessibility, device-admin or location permissions.
- Review “Linked devices” in WhatsApp and log out anything you don’t recognise.
- If you find stalkerware and feel unsafe, contact DRF’s helpline before removing it, because removal can alert the person watching.
You were never off the record. You were just unremarkable.
— Illuminati Pakistan
The Eye is Watching