For most businesspeople the word ‘metadata’ means little. They should know. Simply put, metadata is embedded in every SMS and email and carries the telltale story of your business. This is the word from intelligence expert, Morne Walters, who has spent 15 years stopping snoopers.
Imagine you are a big-time CEO: you’ve gone into a private meeting to close a deal; you pitch a price; you leave. The first thing you do is get on the phone and tell somebody about how it went. But what you don’t know is that the person you are calling has had his phone tapped.
It seems like it’s a story out of a movie but it’s becoming an everyday reality. Walters sits comfortably across the table sipping a cappuccino in Johannesburg. He’s a world away from James Bond, coming from a small town in the Free State, South Africa, and says he prefers the shadows to the limelight. What he does carry is three cellphones that have military-grade protection. Spying in business is on the rise, warns Walters.
Pieter Roux agrees. Roux who has spent two decades encrypting codes for cell phone companies says with more people using smart technology, ignorance is one of the leading reasons why viruses are on the up.
“People still think phones are used only for phone calls, a misconception. It’s more likely there will be security breaches on your android than on your computer because of the nature to think that you are immune on your cell,” says Roux.
Andrew McHenry, another sage with two decades in the IT business, says spying is the talk of programmers. So much so, that they believe everyone moving their data into cloud storage could spell danger. He has seen a rise in products designed to stop hackers like protected SIM cards and $60,000 HTC cell phones, sold to government security offices.
Roux believes the cost of protection will prove too much for consumers. The solution lies in software development, where apps can be screened for viruses. While there is an increase in espionage, Roux thinks many hackers have not yet tapped into the industry.
“Most hackers are not willing to spend the effort decoding something. It is far more common to receive a spoof email, than to have someone who wants to eavesdrop on your calls. It’s easier for fraudsters to scam people with false websites, it is more the trend. We have seen an increase in the one in a million being gullible enough to respond to an email than on phones.”
Most businesspeople cannot take the chance, says Walters.
“While your intentions are genuine, this is industrial espionage, industrial thievery. People get the upper hand. Companies can lose billions of dollars this way. If you and I tender for a deal, and you know that I am going to tender for a million dollars, you can come in at $990,000. Information is used to get ahead of the game,” says Walters.
In September last year, Walters came up with a smart device application to protect classified government installations—he thought he could do the same for business. Five months later, Seecrypt, a-state-of-the-art military-grade encryption app, was born, technology straight from the battlefield to the board room.
“Understanding security means you have to think like a thief. To protect people in privacy, you have to understand how people can access information,” says Walters.
The app works by dialling subscribed clients on a private internet network line. Behind the scenes of an easy-to-use interface, when you make a call the program generates a key by sampling audio noise and a random set of numbers. The key, which has a length of a number to the power of 667, is then re-encrypted a second time before being sent.
Interestingly, it was the Edward Snowden case that made this system popular.
Snowden is the former American intelligence analyst, who exposed American and British government mass surveillance programs to the world; secret programs that had been collecting metadata from millions of internet and cellphone conversations across the globe. His disclosure is said to have ranked among the most significant security breaches in American history.
The news broke when Walters was flying to Johannesburg from the Middle East. By the time he had landed in South Africa, the phone was ringing; including a call from a royal family.
“It was surreal. It was one article from one newspaper and people kept asking how true it was. If you go back to that night it was launched. It was so outrageous that people didn’t believe it at first. By the following Thursday, it was all over,” he says.
Since April, Walters has seen a 400% growth in subscriptions from owners of tens of thousands of phones, laptops and landlines being secured from Nairobi to Washington D.C.
“When we say to people someone is listening to your calls or reading your messages we were told that we were being paranoid. Well the evidence speaks volumes. The reality is that what has been shown in the media has been just the tip of the iceberg. Every country in the world does it. The time has arrived for corporate companies to protect their data,” he says
Walters gathered a number of what he calls ‘sages in the intelligence business’—some poached from the US secret services, the UK ministry of defense and the African Defense Force. Walters now has a team of developers, averaging 25 years of age, fueled by bottomless coffee and containers of jelly beans.
They run a tight operation, working around the clock broken by the odd siesta on a couch. Walters is an entrepreneur, who is likely to make millions out of paranoia, eavesdropping and the fall of Snowden.

Industrial Thief On The Line, How Can I Rob You?

More than 700 emails await Toby Shapshak, according to his Apple iPhone 4, lighting up on the retro red cabinet in the doorway of his Johannesburg home.
<div id="attachment_310" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-310" class="size-large wp-image-310" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/CTX8990-678x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="716" />“[The cellphone] changed from something you hold next to your ear, to something you hold in your hand and look at.” Toby Shaphak</div>“I’m sure there’s many more than that,” he says.
What a difference a couple of decades makes. During the late 1980s, Shapshak wouldn’t have known what an email was and would have been carrying a cellphone that you could hammer a nail in with.
Compare again the iPhone of 2011 to the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X of 1983—the iPhone has 200 hours of standby time, a global positioning system that can geographically locate where you are and can send a picture of your mother to Thailand in two seconds. You had to charge the Motorola DynaTAC for 10 hours to make a one-hour call and it was as light as a lump of lead.
Shapshak, the South African editor of international men’s electronic magazine, Stuff, was one of the first journalists in the country to own a cellphone. “I remember being one of the only journalists with a cellphone and it was completely remarkable to be able to call the newsroom and tell people where I was or what I was doing [and] for people to be able to get hold of me. I remember putting my cellphone number on my first business card. You had a land line, your office address and your postal address, then I had a cellphone number and along came email.”
Motorola came up with the mobile phone in 1983; it weighed nearly a kilogram and could only be used to make calls, nothing else, with a small black screen used to see the numbers punched in the keypad.
Two years later, it reached African shores. Its first African customer was the then government of Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
<div id="attachment_312" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-312" class="size-large wp-image-312" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/7-1-1024x689.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="319" />Albert Gatare 2011</div>
According to the African Leadership Academy, President Mobutu Sese Seko issued the first ever private telecommunications licence to a company called Telecel, founded by Rwanda-born, Miko Rwayitare (who died in 2007) and American, Joseph Gatt.
Rwayitare and Gatt bought 200 of Motorola’s cellphones for President Mobutu and his administration, in a bid to convince the government to switch from land lines. They sold each phone for substantially more than what they were going for in the US at the time. It meant these phones were merely for the moneyed elite of Kinshasa.
Albert Gatare, Rwayitare’s youngest brother, was one of the first Africans to use the phone and says back then it was a symbol of wealth in the city.
“That time those phones were $3,000 or $4,000. It is difficult to understand [now] how people could have bought phones for that much.
“After the commercial launch, it became a symbol of high class; everyone knew that only ministers, CEOs and rich people had those types of phones. Today you take your phone and put it in your pocket, but that time when you went to a restaurant you would put it on the table, just to show off.”
<div id="attachment_311" style="width: 484px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-311" class="size-large wp-image-311" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/4-717x1024.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="677" />Joan Joffe 1994</div>
Telecel’s success was also helped by the continent’s poor fixed landline system, says Gatare. According to Mobile Monday, an international networking organization run by mobile industry professionals, their 2011 Africa report showed that the number of mobile phones exceeded the number of fixed lines by the year 2000. The African Development Bank says the number of land lines is declining.
The company expanded from Zaire into nine other countries: Burundi in 1992; Guinea in 1993; Madagascar in 1994; Central African Republic in 1995; Ivory Coast in 1996; Zambia in 1997 and Zimbabwe, Niger and Togo in 1998.
In South Africa, Joan Joffe was one of the people who launched Vodacom in 1994, the same year she picked up her first cellphone.
“It was amazing that you could walk around and speak. It weighed a ton, though; you could not put it in your handbag, but it was amazing,” she says.
“Our forecast was for 250,000 subscribers in the first 10 years. I can tell you that we had a huge party when the number of connections reached 50,000 towards the middle of the first year. It was a big deal for us,” says Joffe.
Vodacom has customers in South Africa, Tanzania, Lesotho, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Mozambique, and is considered one of the top four networks on the continent along with MTN, Airtel and Orange.
“Today single operators cannot survive, they must be part of a bigger group,” says Gatare.
Rwayitare sold 80% of his Telecel shares to various telecommunication companies, including Orascom in Egypt, MTN in the Ivory Coast and other smaller companies, for
around $47 million. He moved to South Africa, where he built the most expensive house in Johannesburg’s wealthy suburb, Sandhurst.
According to the International Telecommunication Union, in 2010 41.4% of Africans had a cellular subscription.
One of them is South African entrepreneur Jenna Clifford. The founder and designer of a luxury jewellery brand, in the late 1980s, she had what she called her “porty”—short for portable telephone.
“It looked like a little metal suitcase, but it was state of the art at that time. My previous husband bought his first porty and I saw the benefit of being contacted outside of the office and bought one of my own, [but] you could not take it overseas, the costing was huge in those days,” she says.
As her finger glides along the iPhone 4 in her palm, she says: “It has liberated me. It is not rocket science; you check the picture and you click.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-large wp-image-313" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Photos-1024x546.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="253" />
“I felt intuitively that with the advent of the porty, more people would be using them and they would get smaller. Just like computers were once the size of rooms,” says Clifford. “I’m a bit of a prophet.”
Africa is second only to Asia regarding the highest number of mobile subscriptions. And it is not finished yet.

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