EDWARD SNOWDEN’s 2013 leaks from the US National Security Agency triggered a global debate around state surveillance – but even he couldn’t quite believe the scale of the story described to him in the summer of 2021.
Advertisement
Whistle-blowers had handed French investigative journalists Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud a list of 50,000 phone numbers. These belonged to people flagged for attack by a cybersurveillance software package called Pegasus.
The investigation that followed is the subject of Pegasus: The story of the world’s most dangerous spyware, a non-fiction thriller and a must-read for all, not just those interested in cryptography and communications. As the authors warn: “Regular civilians being targeted with military-grade surveillance weapons – against their will, against their knowledge, and with no recourse – is a dystopian future we really are careening toward if we don’t understand this threat and move to stop it.”
Pegasus offers a fascinating insight into how journalism is coping with a hyper-connected world. Eyewitnesses and whistle-blowers have better access than ever to sympathetic campaigning journalists worldwide. But this advantage is shared with the very governments, corporations and organised crime networks that want to silence them.
To drag Pegasus into the light, Richard’s Forbidden Stories consortium choreographed the activities of more than 80 investigative journalists from 17 media organisations working across four continents and in eight languages. The consortium’s mission is to continue and publish the work of other journalists facing threats, prison or murder.
Its Pegasus investigation started in March 2021, knowing full well that it had to conclude by June that year. By then, NSO – the Israeli company that created Pegasus in 2016 – was bound to twig that its brainchild was being hacked.
The bigger the names linked by the consortium to that list of phone numbers, the harder it would be to keep the investigation under wraps. Early on, the name of a journalist called Jorge Carrasco cropped up. He led in one of the consortium’s other cross-border collaborations, which aimed to finish the investigations of murdered Mexican journalist Regina Martínez. Then things got silly: the names of half the French cabinet appeared. Then president Emmanuel Macron.
In a pulse-accelerating account that is never afraid to dip into well-crafted technical detail, the authors explain how Pegasus gains free rein on a mobile device without ever tipping off the owner to its presence. It turns out to have evolved out of software designed to serve consumers waiting in queues on tech support call lines.
Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie, two of the founders of NSO, cut their teeth developing programs that allowed support technicians to take charge of a caller’s phone.
Before long, a European intelligence service came calling. Eventually, Pegasus was sold to more than 60 clients in over 40 countries. It was the first software to give security services an edge over terrorists, criminal gangs and paedophiles – and over whistle-blowers, campaigners, political opponents, journalists and at least struggling for custody of her children.
This book isn’t a diatribe against the necessary (or at any rate ubiquitous) business of government surveillance and espionage. It is about how, in the contest between ordinary people and the powerful, software is tilting the field wildly in the latter’s favour.
The international journalistic collaboration that was the Pegasus Project sparked the biggest global surveillance scandal since Snowden. It led to a European Parliament inquiry into government spyware, legal action from major tech companies, government sanctions against NSO and countless individual legal complaints.
But the authors spend little time sitting on their laurels. Demand for such systems is only growing, with certain governments making offers to certain tech firms that add zeroes to the fees NSO enjoyed. Nor do the authors expect much from the public debate sparked by their investigation: “The issues… might have been raised,” they concede, “but the solutions are not even in the works.”
Simon Ings is a writer based in London
