Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy

by Laurent Richard

Pegasus essentially owns a mobile phone; it can break down defenses built into a cell phone, including encryption, and gain something close to free rein on the device, without ever tipping off the owner to its presence. That includes all text and voice communications to and from the phone, location data, photos and videos, notes, browsing history, even turning on the camera and the microphone of the device while the user has no idea it’s happening. Complete remote personal surveillance, at the push of a button.

For the Pegasus Project to succeed in exposing the scale of the scandal, the journalists knew they would need to be able to diagnose an infection or an attempted infection on an individual phone. Claudio and Donncha figured out how to do it. Working quite literally alone, these two took on a multibillion-dollar corporation that employed 550 well-paid cyberspecialists, many with the highest levels of military cyberwarfare training. To best that Goliath, these two Davids had to fashion their own slingshot, had to invent the methods and tools of their forensics on the fly. That they succeeded is as improbable as it is important, for all our sakes.

investigating. Outside of active war zones, Mexico was and remains to this day the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist committed to telling the truth about bad guys. More than 120 journalists and media staffers had been killed in Mexico in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Another score or so had simply disappeared without a trace.

“The world has hardened, and I think journalism will have to harden,” Scherer said not long before he died in 2015. “If the rivers turn red and the valleys fill with corpses … journalism will have to tell that story with images and words. Heavy tasks await us.”

THAT WAS IT, that simple and straightforward phrase (“if not, my editors and colleagues will finish and publish”): the seed of the idea that would grow into Forbidden Stories. If I can’t my finish my work, I’m counting on you to finish it for me. Five years later, here in an office just a kilometer away from my old building on Rue Nicolas-Appert, Forbidden Stories was real. We were already in the middle of our third major investigation.