Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, rewarding Ben Ali in 2007 for worldwide leadership in NTIC

When it comes to business, it seems anything goes for Microsoft. A Wikileaks cable revealed details about Microsoft’s cooperation with the Tunisian dictatorial regime as it repressed and spied on its population through a large phishing (illicitly gaining personal data online) campaign.

Slim Amamou had already discovered in June 2010 that it is possible to deal with counterfeited SSL certificates, a protocol for the security of online exchanges. Google, which had been informed of this, secured all the internet pages which were acceded from Tunisia and transformed them to HTTPS pages. But this was useless, according to Hackers News, as the Tunisian government, with the help of Microsoft, could steal log-ins and passwords of Tunisian citizens in order to spy on them.

A cable sent by the US embassy in Tunis on September, 22nd, 2006 and recently published by Wikileaks says, “The increasing Government of Tunisia (GOT)  law enforcement capability through IT training is positive, but given heavy-handed GOT interference in the internet, Post questions whether this will expand GOT capacity to monitor its own citizens. Ultimately, for Microsoft the benefits outweigh the costs.”

The wikileaks cable also shows that the partnership contract between the GOT and Microsoft was signed in 2006 in South Africa. The final agreement outlines cooperation on the Tunisian government’s e-governance, cyber security, intellectual property rights, and capacity development for Tunisian information technology programs.

The cable also shows that the agreement touches on internet security as well. Through a program on cyber criminality, Microsoft agreed to train government officials in the Ministries of Justice and Interior on how to use computers and the internet to fight crime. The American firm also agreed to update the entire IT infrastructure of the Tunisian government in exchange for 12,000 Microsoft licenses.

As part of that, Microsoft was willing to increase employment opportunities for handicapped Tunisians, in affiliation with Leila Ben Ali’s charitable association for disabled persons. Microsoft’s reticence to fully disclose the details of the agreement further highlights the Tunisian government’s emphasis on secrecy over transparency.

But for Microsoft,  the diplomatic cable shows that the agreement is the culmination of a five-year negotiation process and that the deal was strategic and very hard to negotiate, as the Tunisian government was using open-source software. This drastically reduced the business opportunities and prevented Microsoft from taking part in calls for tender.

The Redmond, Washington-based firm had to give many concessions to the government. These entailed the company giving the original source code of its software to the Tunisian regime, headed by President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali.  Negotiations were very tense, even for Salwa Smaoui, head of Microsoft Tunisia, who said, “Ministers of the Tunisian Government asked her several times why she deals with the Americans,” and “hostile suspicions affected the negotiations.”