Telecoms, Ubiquitous Surveillance and State Crime: A Case Study From Kenya
Namir Shabibi
Independent Investigative Journalist, UK
September 14, 2026 · Research Paper
Part of the project Investigating the Kill Cloud: AI, Big Tech and Militarisation (2025–2026) by Disruption Network Institute.
Publishing Partner: Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC).
Independent journalist Namir Shabibi draws attention to advances in mobile location intelligence, and the ‘transference’ of military-intelligence analytics to everyday policing and law enforcement, augmented by machine-learning algorithms. Mobile networks and their relevant technologies are central to the surveillance and targeting of vulnerable peoples, particularly migrant and border communities - with life-or-death outcomes. The author’s recent journalism and investigative ethnography in Kenya exposes how police exploits Safaricom's ubiquitous data collection for surveillance and targeting, and how software by Neural Technologies enables it.
Read Abstract
Namir Shabibi
Independent Investigative Journalist, UK
Namir Shabibi is an independent investigative journalist working at the intersection of tech and state crime. He leads the Working Group on Telecoms, Spyware and Surveillance, based at the University of Westminster. Read full bio
The advances in telecoms networks, their ubiquitous use and exploitation, and the militarised use of tech applied to them, has brought us to a scenario once imagined in nightmares: every connected mobile phone is now an effective ankle tag constituting the authoritarian state’s dream-come-true.
Namir Shabibi
Quotes from Telecoms, Ubiquitous Surveillance and State Crime: A Case Study From Kenya
The overrepresentation of commercial spyware in state surveillance investigation and accountability initiatives has helped to obscure the most common vector for mobile surveillance; telecoms networks themselves.
Namir Shabibi
As always, it is the most marginalised communities – such as the ethnic Somali and Muslim border and coastal communities of Kenya – that bear the brunt of pre-emptive suspicion that pre-crime analytics of telecoms networks entail. After all, to fight ‘small wars’, one needs to sift through ‘big data’.
Namir Shabibi
NGOs and other human rights organisations can pivot towards a better understanding of the risks posed by telecom network surveillance, and in-turn they can offer activists, dissidents and protestors effective countermeasures, beyond extreme spyware-specific measures such as Apple’s ‘lockdown mode’.
Namir Shabibi
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Our phones are essential to how we communicate, work and transact. But every time we connect to a telecommunications network, we leave behind a trail of information about where we are, who we communicate with and how we move. What makes this surveillance so powerful is its ubiquity - the infrastructure is embedded in the daily lives of millions of Kenyans. As such, this has become a matter of life and death in Kenya because the ability to locate and track a person has become the ability to target them, and this has further been exacerbated by the William Ruto regime’s notoriety in enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and repression of its critics. Safaricom, a key telco examined in this report, must be held accountable for how it collects, stores and shares this data. The regime must be equally answerable for how it accesses and uses it.
Ernest Cornel Oduor
Senior Communications Officer,
Kenya Human Rights Commission
Abstract
Telecoms, Ubiquitous Surveillance and State Crime: A Case Study From Kenya
Namir Shabibi · Independent Investigative Journalist, UK
Advances in telecoms networks, and the installation of more masts, has meant that networks are becoming more accurate active and passive surveillance tools. Around these developments, the past decade has seen the growth of tech companies exploiting sensitive telecoms (cell site) data, offering the predictive identification of criminal suspects, border and migration monitoring, and tracking of suspects, among others. Yet there is no ‘opt out’ from this form of ‘ubiquitous technical surveillance’. This research draws on journalistic investigations by the author into the role of telecoms companies in the ecosystem of tech and state crime. It argues that what was once an authoritarian’s dream has become our everyday reality, with life or death implications in global majority countries.
In recent years, human rights groups have dedicated the bulk of their resources around phone surveillance towards a niche area, spyware use, despite its application being extremely rare. Yet many of spyware’s purposes can be achieved without use of costly malware, using telecoms network (or cell site) surveillance and ‘lawful interception’. As a consequence, the human rights community have developed a blind spot towards ‘ubiquitous technical intelligence’, and its dangers, and life-or-death implications in the majority world.
Combining his recent investigations with new research, the author will explain the vulnerability of sensitive telecoms (cell site) data to a growing range of surveillance practices, enabled by largely-unscrutinised tech companies integrating with ‘ubiquitous data collectors’. Practices range from the pre-crime modelling of subscribers, to the predictive identification of suspects and tracking of dissidents, with marginalised regions, vulnerable migrants and border populations subjected to blanket, geo-fenced surveillance. There is no ‘lockdown mode’ and no ‘opt-out’ from “near-perfect surveillance” of telecoms networks, as the US Supreme Court judged.
Borrowing the concept of ‘ubiquitous technical surveillance’, this research will survey developments in telecoms network surveillance, both bulk, predictive and targeted, noting the historic transference of military-intelligence tech to everyday policing. As telecoms networks progress, with 6g on the horizon, and the number of masts increase, the telecoms surveillance web intensifies year-on-year. Relying on field research by the author, this report also points to specific uses of that data by tactical police units and paramilitary state forces, including death squads. It argues that the networks and tech – once imagined in nightmares – are now our everyday reality; the authoritarian state’s dream-come-true.
Other works by Namir Shabibi
🔗 Anatomy of An AI Kill Chain · Investigation for Airwars and AINow by Goodfriend S., Khlaaf H., Shabibi N., Dyke J. and Walker N., 28 July 2026.
🔗 ’We Want to Use it for Everything’: How Project Maven became central to America’s AI-powered warfare · Shabibi N. & Croft A, The Independent, 10 March 2026
🔗 AI, a dead student, and US airstrikes: How a civilian became caught up in a new age of warfare · Shabibi N., The Independent, 10 March 2026.
Reports 2025–2026 · Investigating the Kill Cloud: AI, Big Tech & Militarisation
Architecture of Disappearance
The Kill Cloud’s Dispersal of Violence and Erosion of Sovereignty
Cian Westmoreland · Whistleblower, Former US Air Force Drone Technician, US
September 1
Telecoms, Ubiquitous Surveillance and State Crime
A Case Study From Kenya
Namir Shabibi · Independent Investigative Journalist, UK
September 14
Automated Extraction
Tactics of Surveillance and Targeting Indigenous Peoples on the border of Mexico and the US
Tiara Roxanne · Scholar and Artist, US/DE
October 5
Namir Shabibi
Independent Investigative Journalist, UK
Namir Shabibi is an independent investigative journalist working at the intersection of tech and state crime. He is a visiting lecturer in Geopolitics, and a Quintin Hogg-sponsored PhD candidate researching covert intelligence operations in global majority countries. Namir also leads the Working Group on Telecoms, Spyware and Surveillance, based at the University of Westminster, and conducts research for Unredacted, a national security investigative project. Namir is a former International Committee of the Red Cross delegate investigating breaches of the Geneva Conventions in Darfur and Guantanamo Bay.