Radio Katwe stands by story on CMI phone-tapping in Uganda

The NRM government has denied a story published by Radio Katwe that it is using Military Intelligence to tap the phones of subscribers in Uganda.
( Click here to see story on CMI tapping.)

The refutation was contained in a story published on March 15, 2006 by the Daily Monitor a private newspaper based in Kampala, Uganda.

The Ugandan army spokesman, Major Felix Kulaigye, told the Daily Monitor that "all the allegations on that website [Radio Katwe.com] are false."

Let us state here and now that the story on phone tapping in Uganda was true and was carefully crosschecked. Major Kulaigye was saying what he is expected to say as a government spokesman.

If you look at the Daily Monitor story, you will realize that Celtel is not mentioned as one of the networks mentioned as tapping phones.

It is commonly known down here in Kampala that the First Family has business interests in MTN and UTL.

Celtel is a different story. In fact, if you want to check these three phone companies online, you will see that the MTN website is mtn.co.ug and the UTL website is utl.co.ug, but the Celtel website is celtel.com

MTN has a major switch base station located across the road from the Bugolobi flats and the UTL switch station is integrated with the old Post Office system.

That is how the Uganda government has control of the tapping and monitoring of phones, because they can plant CMI engineers there on site to coordinate with the CMI technicians who illegally tap the phones from a system based at Okello House in Nakasero.

With Celtel, the back entry into the mobile phone system is not located in Uganda, but in the United States, so the Uganda government has not way of controlling Celtel and illegally tapping people's phones.

Phone calls on the Celtel network are re-routed through switches located outsideUganda, as most of the e-mail in Uganda is routed.

This makes Celtel the only phone network in Uganda which you can regard as generally safe from Ugandan intelligence eavesdropping.

In recent years, the European Union delegation offices in Kampala complained about phone-tapping, that is why they switched from MTN and UTL Mango to Celtel.

The American embassy and the British High Commission in Kampala, in addition to other European embassies and consuls all use Celtel.

This is not because of lower call costs at Celtel (European embassies could afford any costs in Uganda), but because of the crucial fact that the western embassies feel a little safer using the Celtel network which the Uganda government cannot so easily tap.

Someone wrote a letter or an article in one of the Ugandan dailies recently asking why the FDC national mobiliser, Major-General Mugisha Muntu, always uses public call boxes to make politically sensitive phone calls.

Can the Uganda government explain that?

Radio Katwe therefore stands absolutely by its story and insists that the MTN and UTL networks are tapped by ISO and CMI.