On Saturday, Neelie Kroes blogged about her visit to Azerbaijan and attendance at the conference. On her blog she said simply, “Activists were harassed at the Internet conference. My advisers had their computers hacked. So much for openness.”
It would appear that two members of staff, including Kroes’ spokesman Ryan Heath, were notified by Apple that their computers had been accessed by an unknown device. Heath said that he believed it was an attempt to spy on him, but the computer contained “only my photos and Kroes’ statements on it, since the hard drive was recently wiped clear for a repair.”
"I'm presuming it was some kind of surveillance," Heath told Associated Press. "What we're going to do is to get the computers forensically analyzed to see what if anything was taken out of them."
Azerbaijan is an oil- and gas-rich country on the shores of the Caspian sea between Russia and Iran. It has a very poor human rights record. The French organization Reporters Without Borders places the country at 162 out of 179 on its press freedom barometer. Its latest report comments, “The Internet, until recently a surprisingly free conduit for information and activism in Azerbaijan, has been a particular target. Social media networks were placed under close scrutiny, and blocked from time to time, and several online activists such as the blogger Bakhtiyar Hajiyev were given harsh prison sentences. Several independent news sites were hacked repeatedly.”
Heath does not believe any EC data was compromised in Baku. “We mentioned it because it served to underline our point about problems with free expression in Azerbaijan, rather than because of any obvious damage done,” Heath told EurActiv. “No Commission device was compromised.”
An Azerbaijani spokesman told the BBC that no details of the alleged hack had been passed by the EC to the Azeri authorities. He denied there had been any interference with the laptops and said Kroes' claims were made to undermine the image of the country.