A leak reveals government spying on journalists and opponents with the Pegasus program

It is a new step in the surveillance of opponents and independent journalists by more or less authoritarian regimes, a system that stealthily allows spying on mobile phones of people uncomfortable for power, with all their content: calls, messages, contacts, photographs. The existence of the Pegasus program, developed and marketed by the Israeli company NSO Group, was known. Nearly 50 governments, including several authoritarian governments, have now been known to use it to control tens of thousands of potential targets around the world, according to the journalists' consortium Forbidden Stories and the Amnesty International organization.

The revelation - published on Sunday by the newspapers

Le Monde

and

The Guardian

, among other international media - is based on the leak of a list of 50,000 phone numbers identified as potential targets since 2016 by NSO clients, although not all have been infected. .

Among the states that used the NSO program according to the revelations are Mexico, Hungary, Morocco, India, Saudi Arabia, Rwanda and Azerbaijan.

More information

• Microsoft claims that an Israeli company created spyware that was used in Catalonia

• A Mexican journalist murdered in 2017 was previously spied on by the Pegasus 'software'

Among the 180 journalists included in the list of potential targets are, according to

The Guardian

, professionals from the main international media, including

The Financial Times

,

The New York Times

and EL PAÍS. Also journalists such as the Moroccan Omar Radi, arrested in July 2020 and accused of espionage and of attacking state security, in addition to rape, or people around Jamal Khashogi, the Saudi opponent killed in Istanbul in 2018 and professionals in Azerbaijan , Hungary or India.

The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, declared that the revelations must be verified, but that, if confirmed, it would be "absolutely unacceptable" the use of spyware against journalists, reports Reuters. French Government spokesman Gabriel Attal described the revelations as "extremely serious." "It is very serious that there are manipulations, techniques that seek to damage the freedom of journalists, their freedom to investigate, to report," Attal told the France Info chain.

About a thousand French telephone numbers are among those spied on with the Pegasus program, according to the public channel Radio France, which states that France is not a client of NSO. It is Morocco, the revelations add, the probable origin of the espionage of some French journalists such as Edwy Plenel, head of the left-wing investigative newspaper

Mediapart,

or of other countries, such as the Spanish Ignacio Cembrero, specialist in the Maghreb.

"Journalists have long believed that new technologies - the army of encrypted communications they trust - were their allies: a key protection against censorship,"

Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud, responsible for Forbidden Stories

, write in

The Guardian

. "With the existence of cyber surveillance tools as advanced as Pegasus, they have brutally realized that the greatest threats are hidden in places that they previously believed were the safest." That is, on their phones.

In response to journalists who have uncovered this alleged espionage, the NSO company responded: “NSO Group firmly denies the false accusations raised in its investigation. These accusations are in many cases unsubstantiated theories that cast serious doubts on the credibility of their sources, as well as on the core of the investigation ”.

In July 2020, an investigation by EL PAÍS and

The Guardian

already revealed that the motives of several Catalan independence leaders, including the then president of the Parliament, Roger Torrent, had been the target of the Pegasus program. Both the Spanish Ministry of the Interior as well as the Police and the Civil Guard assured then that they have never hired the services of NSO. The National Intelligence Center (CNI) affirmed that it "always acts in full compliance with the legal system."

Unlike the US National Security Agency (NSA) program, unveiled in 2013 and capable of indiscriminately monitoring phone records, the Pegasus program allows states that have acquired it to target specific individuals, get into their phones, capture their content and even activate their microphone and camera. Another peculiarity is that, in this case, it is not about hackers or the government of global powers, but rather a private company that sells a product to governments, whose secret services are thus endowed with an espionage capacity that, otherwise Thus, it would only be available to the richest and most powerful states.

The problem with the Pegasus program, if the list of 50,000 targets is confirmed, is that it does not serve only to spy and fight criminal or terrorist organizations, the use for which it would have been theoretically conceived. The problem would be that it had been used outside of any legal framework and mainly to spy on human rights activists, journalists and opponents, as well as heads of State and Government, diplomats and those responsible for other espionage services.

"Analysis of the data," writes

Le Monde

,

"shows that, for a large part of NSO's clients, terrorism and high crime constitute only a tiny fraction of uses."

Le Monde

adds that the investigation "demonstrates incontestably that these abuses are the norm and not the exception."

NSO does not deny possible abuses. The Israeli company has promised, according to the statement with which it has reacted to the Forbidden Stories disclosures, "to continue investigating credible allegations of abusive use [of the program] and will act on the results of the investigations." And adds. “This may consist of interrupting the access of some clients to the system in case of confirmed abuses. He has done it in the past and he will not hesitate to repeat it ”.