More than 1,000 French people are affected.
Human rights activists, journalists and opponents around the world have been spied on using Pegasus software, developed by the Israeli company NSO Group, according to an investigation published in several media on Sunday.
Further information, concerning the surveillance of several heads of state and government, is expected to be released in the coming days.
Pegasus, if inserted into a smartphone, allows you to retrieve messages, photos, contacts, and even listen to calls from its owner. The company, founded in 2011 and which has regularly been accused of playing into the game of authoritarian regimes, has always ensured that its software was only used to obtain information against criminal or terrorist networks. But Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International were given access to a list, compiled in 2016, of 50,000 phone numbers that NSO clients had selected for potential surveillance. It includes the numbers of at least 180 journalists, 600 politicians, 85 human rights activists, or 65 business leaders… according to an analysis carried out by 17 editorial staff.
This list includes the number of a Mexican journalist Cecilio Pineda Birto, shot dead a few weeks after appearing on this document.
Foreign correspondents from several major media, including the Wall Street Journal, CNN, France 24, Mediapart, El País, or AFP are also part of it.
In France, two journalists from Mediapart including Edwy Plenel, but also the current general controller of places of deprivation of liberty and former journalist of the Canard enchaîné Dominique Simonnot or the columnist Eric Zemmour are also listed.
According to France Info, more than 1,000 French people are concerned.
Phones analyzed
"What we see with the Pegasus project is very different and even more worrying than what we saw in the Snowden affair," said Laurent Richard, director of Forbidden Stories, with France info. Here we are dealing with a private company that sells extremely intrusive software to states known for their repressive human rights policies and against journalists. And we can clearly see that these States are using this tool to use it against these populations. »Several countries are singled out: Mexico, India, Morocco, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Togo, Rwanda and even Hungary, member of the European Union.
Journalists from the media consortium that conducted the investigation, including Le Monde, Mediapart, The Guardian, and The Washington Post, met some of those targeted and recovered 67 phones, which were subjected to '' technical expertise in an Amnesty International laboratory. It confirmed an infection or attempted infection with NSO Group spyware for 37 devices, according to reports released on Sunday. Two of the phones belong to women close to Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, assassinated in 2018 in his country's consulate in Istanbul by a commando of agents from Saudi Arabia.
This analysis, which undermines the company's communication, comes in addition to a study, conducted in 2020, by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, which had confirmed the presence of the Pegasus software in the phones of dozens of employees of the Al-Jazeera channel in Qatar.