Top officials’ phone calls can no longer be bugged

KABUL (Pajhwok): Telephonic conversations of the president, his deputies and some other high-ranking government officials could no longer be tapped, a Ministry of Telecommunication and Information Technology official said on Friday.

Last year, there were reports that nearly two millions telephone calls made by Afghans had been tapped by US spooks.

The same year, Telecommunications and Information Technology Minister Amirzai Sangin told lawmakers that phones calls in Afghanistan continued to be unsafe from being spied on.

But Sangin’s ministry says now it has activated a system that no one could monitor telephonic conversations of Afghan officials.

The ministry’s spokesman, Nasratullah Rahimi, told Pajhwok Afghan News: “With Salaam telecom network calling cards, we have kept secure the phone calls of the president, his deputies and members of the Cabinet from being bugged.”

He said they were trying to make secure phone calls of governors and lawmakers if necessary.

He said the system in other networks had not been activated in the past by the ministry because foreigners worked there, but Salaam was a government telecom network, where only Afghans worked.

The spokesman said he would not share the cost and details of the system due to security concerns.

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