This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth

What NSO offered law enforcement was a powerful workaround, a tool to keep them from going blind. By hacking the “end points” of the communication—the phones themselves—NSO’s technology gave authorities access to data before and after it was encrypted on their target’s device. Not long after Caproni testified to Congress, Hulio and Lavie pivoted and began pitching their remote access technology as a surveillance tool. They called the tool Pegasus, and like the mythological winged horse it was named for, it could do the seemingly impossible: capture vast amounts of previously inaccessible data—phone calls, text messages, email, contacts, calendar appointments, GPS location data, Facebook, WhatsApp and Skype conversations—from the air without leaving a trace. Pegasus could even do what NSO called “room tap”: gather sounds and snapshots in and around the room using the phone’s microphone and video camera. It could deny targets access to certain websites and applications, grab screenshots off their phones, and record their every search and browsing activity. One of the biggest selling points was that the spyware was “battery conscious.” One of the few tells that you may have spyware on your device is a constantly draining battery. All that spying and siphoning can be a battery hog. But Pegasus came with a nifty trick. It could sense when it was killing battery life, shut itself down, and wait for a target to connect to WiFi before extracting any more data. This was, as far as ...