Justice For Myanmar (JFM) has today called for investigation and action against Compelson, a Prague-based digital forensics company, for selling its MOBILedit Forensic Pro surveillance technology to the Myanmar military regime’s police force. This software is particularly valuable to the military council as it can bypass security protections, recover deleted data from secure communication applications, and extract information from phones. The technology enables the Myanmar military council and its subordinate police force to target, surveil, and illegally arrest those they consider threats to their authority.
JFM has discovered numerous follow-up emails from Compelson to the military police’s cybercrime department regarding license renewal. In one email dated July 2021, a Compelson employee urged the military police to upgrade their software to enable ‘direct reading’ from Apple Watches and access vulnerabilities in Linux, Android, and mobile phones. The software likely falls under category 5A004 of the EU’s dual-use items list, which includes systems designed to extract data from phones and bypass encryption. Furthermore, it may violate EU Council Regulation 2018/647 Article 3(b) concerning Myanmar, implemented in April 2018. Despite filing a report about Compelson’s sanctions violations to the EU through the whistleblowing mechanism in February last year, JFM has received no response to date.
While Compelson claims that the software sale occurred before the attempted coup and that export permission was unnecessary because the software cannot crack passwords or recover deleted data, JFM notes that this contradicts the company’s own marketing materials. JFM suggests that Compelson should remotely disable the software provided to Myanmar’s police force if possible. JFM spokesperson Ma Yadanar Maung stated that Compelson knowingly provided powerful surveillance technology to Myanmar’s police force, which is responsible for ongoing crimes against humanity. She emphasized that both the Czech Republic and Compelson have a responsibility to ensure they are not supporting the military council’s digital dictatorship and current atrocities, and that Compelson must take all possible steps to prevent further use of their software by the Myanmar military council.
