TURKISH AK PARTY CHANGES HOTEL OVER WIRETAPPING FEARS

ANKARA — AK Party officials decided not to hold their biannual meeting at the Asya Termal, a hotel run by a Gülen Movement affiliate, over concerns that the venue may be bugged. The hotel in Ankara’s Kızılcahamam district was the traditional venue for the biannual consultation meetings of AK Party members until after private conversations in the previous meeting were secretly recorded and leaked. 

Gülenists are also accused of secretly recording private meetings at hotel rooms via hidden cameras.

The meetings on May 3 and 4 will be held in Antalya instead of the Ankara hotel. 

[Read more- the Daily Sabah]

Hotel Conf table 2

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Hotels are popular places for important meetings, but there is a lot to be concerned about. The rooms themselves are not very complicated to sweep, as the furniture is usually minimal, BUT there are many vulnerabilities that should be recognized and may need to be dealt with. Here are a some considerations:

1. Secure the room

Can the room be secured after the sweep and kept secure until the meeting begins?  Too often the catering or decorating staff want to come in a the last moment to add new flowers, more drinks, etc., that opens a way to introduce a bugging or recording device into the area.

2. Built-in surveillance

Hotels are often wired for their own sound systems, including built-in speakers and sometimes built-in microphones and cameras. All of this typically would be wired back to a central location where hotel staff can monitor activities or control audio.  Depending on the confidentiality of the scheduled meeting, these should also be inspected and steps may need to be taken to make sure no one is using such equipment for eavesdropping from a separate control room in the hotel. At a hotel in France, the AV staff was proud to show us their elaborate control room where they could monitor audio and video from every conference room in the entire hotel. We have found others with covert audio and video monitoring installed for the wait staff, “in order to serve you better”, so they could see when the next course of the meal needed to be served. (It should also go without saying- don’t use wireless microphones unless they are encrypted.)

3. In-place monitoringHotel ConfRoom1

 Along with sweeping the room prior to the meeting, monitoring of radio signals can be performed during the meeting. With the right preparation, radio transmissions coming from within the meeting can be detected and proper personnel informed.

4. Access control

Once you swept the room and secured it, and set up an in-place monitoring team, that can all be a waste if the personnel attending the meeting are allowed to bring in their own devices- could be cell phones, recording devices, laptops- a decision has to be made as to what level of security is needed. Walk through metal detectors, cellular detectors, even X-ray machines may be in order.

5. Location, location, location

Information about the location of your confidential meeting should also be kept on a need-to-know basis; allow for the possible need to change hotels or at least change rooms.  In the article above, they rescheduled their meeting to a different hotel, but then proceeded to announce it publicly. A turkish bath might be a better choice for truly confidential meetings.

The steps you take depend on the sensitivity and confidentiality of the meetings but the vulnerabilities should not be overlooked.