One of the conveners of the #FixTheCountry campaign has alleged that operatives within the government, working in connection with authorities of Vodafone, unlawfully cloned their phones and accessed their private chats.
Oliver Barker-Vormawor, who is a lawyer and one of the forerunners for the campaign, explained in detail how they were coerced into a meeting that turned out to be a cabinet meeting when they were initially made to believe that they were to meet the Police Inspector-General.
Speaking on Saturday, May 8, 2021, edition of NewsFile on the JoyNews channel and monitored by GhanaWeb, he said that they were "forced" into the meeting and made to leave out their phones.
And then, he added, after the meeting, the only person among them who uses an Android phone noticed that he could no longer access the chats in their group.
He explained that this forced them to format the phone after it emerged that calls coming to that person's line were being diverted.
“This is a point we’re considering taking legal action on; it’s very important and for me, it breaks my spirit and even undermines my belief in the democracy we live in. When we went to that same meeting, the National Security insisted that our representatives could not go into the meeting with their phones and so they took the phones from them – again, we weren’t expecting that meeting. When we left that meeting, we have credibly established that one of our representatives – the only person who was using an Android phone, his phone was cloned and that all the messages and conversations we were having on our platform, he could no longer access it. And so, what we did was that we flashed his phone immediately.
“It has turned out to us that we discovered that calls from his phone were being diverted to another phone. We have that number and we will put that number online. When we search online for it through Truecaller, it is called ‘Monitoring’ on Vodafone.
"Now, under the circumstances the government has mounted unlawful surveillance against people who have just given notice to voice their protest on the streets, having participated in any illegal activity, and we are going forward, out this in the public domain, and we are going to sue. And we are going to have the police and the telecom authorities involved, give that information to the court, under the circumstances under which the government, we believe, has broken the civil liberties of people by subjecting us to unlawful surveillance," he explained.
The #FixTheCountry conveners are alleging that the government unlawfully cloned their phone