The vast investigation (involving 17 news organizations and non-profit organizations) released on Sunday lifted the veil on a huge scandal. Spyware from the Israeli cyber intelligence company NSO Group has been used to spy on heads of state, Journalists, activists and lawyers around the world.
Because it is important:
Authoritarian governments (explicitly or implicitly) have used this spyware “to facilitate large-scale human rights abuses around the world.” Numbers of more than 50.000 people spied on have been leaked, including the family of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. This is the complaint from Amnesty International, which helped conduct the research. NSO commented on the findings, calling the report “false.” The NSO Pegasus software spyware investigation, known as Pegasus Project, was conducted by a consortium of publications including the Washington Post, the Guardian and 15 other media outlets. With them also Amnesty International and the non-profit journalism organization Forbidden Stories based in Paris.
Security lab by Amnesty International. Photo by Arif Hudaverdi Yaman / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
A long list of special “watches” for spyware
The (huge) list of numbers does not necessarily mean that spyware hacked all of these phones. According to the consortium, however, they were all potential surveillance targets. Reporters identified “more than 1.000 people in more than 50 countries through searches and interviews on four continents,” the Washington Post reports. TAmong the targets were “at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists, 189 journalists and more than 600 politicians and government officials,” along with several heads of state, prime ministers and members of the Arab royal family.
The spyware allegedly targeted journalists from major news organizations. Employees of the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, New York Times. Al Jazeera, France 24, El País, Associated Press, Le Monde. Bloomberg, Reuters and others.
The report did not reveal the source of the leak, nor how reporters verified the material.
The defense of NSO
NSO has long dismissed criticism of its software, saying Pegasus helps solve crimes, fight terrorism and bring criminals to justice. The group announced a wide range of human rights protections in 2019 after being accused of selling its Pegasus spyware to authoritarian governments, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
The NSO lawyer Thomas Clare disputed “inaccuracies” in the report, saying the consortium had “apparently misinterpreted and mischaracterized the crucial source data on which it relied.”
NSO Group has good reason to believe that this list of “thousands of phone numbers” is not a list of numbers targeted by governments using Pegasus, but may instead be part of a larger list of numbers that may have been used by NSO Group customers for other purposes.
Thomas Clare, legal NSO
Spyware: that's not all
Amnesty said in a statement that the Pegasus Project's media partners will publish more stories next week "exposing details of how world leaders, politicians, human rights activists and journalists were selected as potential targets of this spyware."
