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

by Laurent Richard

“For the average citizen, the cell phone now serves the purpose of both tracker and wireless data collection devices, as well as the less important function of the phone,” Azano wrote in his personal blog. “It is the perfect tool for a society that has come to depend more and more on surveillance, whether we like it or not. The government, it should be noted, did not hand out smartphones to American citizens and demand they keep detailed logs of their every move. Americans did that to themselves. People were excited about doing it, constantly seeking new ways to advertise where they were, what they were doing, and with whom. Can people really blame governments and advertisers for taking advantage of their actions? Or do people accept that these are the repercussions of naivete, and a nation caught up in a love affair with new technology?” AZANO SAW THE potential of NSO, this new entrant into the “Intrusion as a Service” industry, right away.

“You used to have to sneak into offices to leak documents. You used to need a gun to rob a bank. Now you can do both from bed with a laptop in hand.… Hacking is a powerful tool, let’s learn and fight!”

Audrey was working on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states; this also drew her to Turkey. We had already noticed some really interesting anomalies in the data around the time Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Claudio had seen evidence suggesting that the Turkish government was blocking URL addresses related to the Pegasus spyware. They had blocked all the Pegasus domains that Amnesty International had published in previous reports. More interesting, the Turkish block list now included new Pegasus domains that had not

What animates Donncha, without question, is curiosity. Curiosity has been the fount of almost all of his triumphs, and almost all of his considerable tribulations. Curiosity was what kept that little boy up later than he should have been on school nights, tapping away at a keyboard, with the glow of a computer monitor lighting his otherwise dark room.

early computer technologist and founding executive editor of Wired, Kevin Kelly: “There is no powerfully constructive technology that is not also powerfully destructive in another direction. Just as there is no great idea that cannot be greatly perverted for great harm. The greater the promise of a new technology, the greater its potential for harm as well.”

“In many regimes, small-time henchmen like him come back begging, later, claiming they were only ‘carrying out orders.’

Aliyev’s “obsession with honor means those who criticize and expose corruption will be seen as enemies of the state,” Knaus says. “The rulers know that in the end their rule is more fragile than it might appear. If you are insecure, you cannot tolerate any dissent. You crush everything.”

President Aliyev, one US diplomat admitted, “complicates our approach to Baku and has the unfortunate effect of framing what should be a strategically valuable relationship as a choice between US interests and US values.”