A British private surveillance company denied on Thursday that it had bugged the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been living for over a year.
Ecuador’s foreign minister Ricardo Patino made the allegation against the Surveillance Group Ltd in Quito on Wednesday, adding that Ecuador would seek help from the British government to get to the bottom of the matter.
In a statement, the Surveillance Group’s CEO Timothy Young rejected Patino’s allegation as “completely untrue”. “The Surveillance Group do not and have never been engaged in any activities of this nature,” Young said.
“We have not been contacted by any member of the Ecuadorean government and our first notification about this incident was via the press this morning,” he said.
The Foreign Office in London declined to comment.
Patino described the Surveillance Group as “one of the biggest private investigation and undercover surveillance companies in the UK”.
On its website, the company says it combines “the practices, skills and experience of special forces, police and commercial surveillance to create an entirely new form of surveillance”.
It says its clients include British law enforcement agencies, other government bodies and financial institutions, and that it has teams in Europe and Canada.
Services on offer include digital forensics, corporate investigations, professional witness surveillance and intelligence reports, according to the company website.
{{/usCountry}}Services on offer include digital forensics, corporate investigations, professional witness surveillance and intelligence reports, according to the company website.
{{/usCountry}}Web giants back mass protest plans
London: Some web firms have reportedly backed the protests planned for Thursday, against NSA’s surveillance programmes.
Websites like Reddit, Mozilla, and Wordpress are amongst others who have called on the US government to end the “unconstitutional surveillance”, BBC reports.