Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance – governments are spying on critics, journos, etc without a warrant using commercial Pegasus spyware by NSO
Billions of people are inseparable from their phones. Their devices are within reach – and earshot – for almost every daily experience, from the most mundane to the most intimate.
Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos and location, activating their microphone to record them in real time.
Such are the capabilities of Pegasus, the spyware manufactured by NSO Group, the Israeli purveyor of weapons of mass surveillance.
NSO rejects this label. It insists only carefully vetted government intelligence and law enforcement agencies can use Pegasus, and only to penetrate the phones of “legitimate criminal or terror group targets”.
Yet in the coming days the Guardian will be revealing the identities of many innocent people who have been identified as candidates for possible surveillance by NSO clients in a massive leak of data.
Without forensics on their devices, we cannot know whether governments successfully targeted these people. But the presence of their names on this list indicates the lengths to which governments may go to spy on critics, rivals and opponents.
Over the coming week we will be revealing the identities of more people whose phone numbers appear in the leak. They include lawyers, human rights defenders, religious figures, academics, businesspeople, diplomats, senior government officials and heads of state.
Our reporting is rooted in the public interest. We believe the public should know that NSO’s technology is being abused by the governments who license and operate its spyware. But we also believe it is in the public interest to reveal how governments look to spy on their citizens and how seemingly benign processes such as HLR lookups can be exploited in this environment.
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Companies such as NSO operate in a market that is almost entirely unregulated, enabling tools that can be used as instruments of repression for authoritarian regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.
The market for NSO-style surveillance-on-demand services has boomed post-Snowden, whose revelations prompted the mass adoption of encryption across the internet. As a result the internet became far more secure, and mass harvesting of communications much more difficult.
But that in turn spurred the proliferation of companies such as NSO offering solutions to governments struggling to intercept messages, emails and calls in transit. The NSO answer was to bypass encryption by hacking devices.
Two years ago the then UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, David Kaye, called for a moratorium on the sale of NSO-style spyware to governments until viable export controls could be put in place. He warned of an industry that seemed “out of control, unaccountable and unconstrained in providing governments with relatively low-cost access to the sorts of spying tools that only the most advanced state intelligence services were previously able to use”.
His warnings were ignored. The sale of surveillance continued unabated. That GCHQ-like surveillance tools are now available for purchase by repressive governments may give some of Snowden’s critics pause for thought.
