Regulating snooping

The shadowy world of intelligence-gathering has come under the spotlight in Lebanon, Lucy Fielder reports from Beirut

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A debate over how to regulate eavesdropping on other people's telephone conversations has become the latest sparring match between Lebanon's two main political currents. At the heart of the issue is the competition between various security agencies which differ in political allegiance. The only point all sides agree on is that wiretapping has spiralled out of control.

In a country popularly portrayed, since before its civil war years, as a den of spies, the knowledge that "everybody listens to everybody", as security expert Timur Goksel puts it, comes as no surprise.

Goksel said that in his former role as spokesman for the UNIFIL peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon, it was widely understood that the lines were tapped. Foreign agencies, including Israel, Lebanese army and security bodies and various political parties still listen in to calls routinely, he said. "If it's done by state actors and security then that's fine and is done everywhere. But in Lebanon, it's out of control."

The long-standing practice hit the headlines against the backdrop of elections coming up in June, ongoing accusations by the 14 March anti- Syrian parliamentary majority that the Shia guerrilla and political group Hizbullah has created a "state within a state" in its southern areas of influence, and the creation of the International Tribunal to try suspects for the killing of former prime minister Rafik Al-Hariri, which is due to start functioning administratively in March.

Last month Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, a key 14 March figure, accused Telecommunications Minister Gebran Bassil, from the opposing political team, of withholding information from the Internal Security Forces, Lebanon's police, and interfering with the transfer of information to the international court.

The court issue has long been a political battleground between the Western-backed 14 March and their opponents, led by Hizbullah. Washington, 14 March and others in Lebanon and abroad have accused Syria of Al-Hariri's killing; Damascus denies involvement and says the courts are being used as a political tool against it.

Bassil, from opposition Christian leader Michel Aoun's Free Patriotic Movement, said he had only briefly held up information to question the legality of wiretapping. "There has been a consistent complaint of the lack of cooperation by the new telecommunications minister by 14 March," Osama Safa, head of the Lebanese Centre for Policy Studies, said, adding that the issue came in the context of the imminent launch of the international tribunal.

Goksel said it was hard to know the background amid the political mudslinging. "The minister's saying he's trying to regulate the whole tapping process, while the other side is saying that while he's doing that he's holding back information," he said. "Anyone who tries to bring order to this will be accused of preventing the gathering of information, because any attempt at regulating wiretapping stops people from doing what they want."

The Lebanese cabinet has announced new regulations that are supposed to ensure people's privacy but permit the interior and defence ministries to intercept calls connected to political and terrorist criminal activity, and allow the state prosecutor's office to track calls linked to ordinary criminal activity.

"The law aims to organise wiretapping and allow it by a judicial warrant that protects civil liberties and makes sure it happens only in times of terrorist crimes or crimes against the state," Safa said. People were sure to go round the rules, he said, citing Hizbullah and Palestinian groups in Lebanon as non-state actors who were also listening in to calls. "But it's good to have a regulatory framework."

Nedim Houry, Lebanon and Syria researcher for Human Rights Watch, said that one troubling aspect of the new regulations was that as well as by judicial warrant, permission to wiretap could also come by military order, meaning that in effect it could continue in some cases without judicial oversight.

"The concern that we have with the debate is that it's being held on the level of political negotiation and not on the basis of rights to privacy, basic rights of individuals and what you do with this information that you obtain," he said. "The heart of the matter is that security institutions and officers are still mostly accountable to certain political leaders and blocs, rather than to a state that is accountable to its citizens," he said.

This debate has grown over the three years since Al-Hariri's assassination, which pitched Lebanon into a battle between the Western-backed 14 March and Hizbullah and its allies, who reject what they see as Western interference. Both the army intelligence and General Security body are seen as close to Hizbullah. As the battle heated up, along with pressure on the guerrillas to disarm, a controversial new official security body, the Information Branch, was set up within the Internal Security Forces to counteract Hizbullah's (and by extension, its critics say, Syria's) influence. That body is widely seen as close to Al-Hariri's Future Movement, led by the late politician's son, Saad.

Although the new regulations have been announced, the cabinet has continued to meet over the issue, suggesting that political horse-trading over security prerogatives may be going on behind the scenes. Few expect much to change in the murky world of intelligence-gathering.