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January 26 - March 25, 2023
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.
“If you’re giving a police officer a gun and if that police officer starts shooting innocent people, you are not to be blamed. But if you’re giving a chimpanzee a gun and the chimpanzee shoots someone, you can’t blame the chimpanzee. Right? You will be to blame.”
Our minds extend beyond our heads and into our phones.
Professor Smith was making the case back then for a zone of privacy that extended to our mobile phone. If the state has no right to access the thoughts in our head, why should it have the right to access the pieces of our thoughts that we keep in our mobile phone?
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.
Mexican political dissident Subcomandante Marcos: “We are sorry for the inconvenience, but this is a revolution.”
Pegasus being used to target human rights defenders, lawyers, and journalists.
The most active client state by far was Mexico, with more than fifteen thousand separate numbers selected for possible targeting.
The group with the largest number of targets on its collective back—well over 120 and counting—was journalists.
once the newest pipelines were in place in 2019, oil and gas from Azerbaijan would begin flowing into Europe in unprecedented quantities—to the tune of about $50 billion, at a minimum.
So did this happen?
There was a surfeit of smartphones and a dearth of smart users.
Merida Initiative.
So whirs the virtuous cycle at the heart of the free market promise, a cycle that fosters creativity and growth, and makes everybody better. Depending on your definition of “better.”
A way to monitor bad actors on the internet as they coordinated potentially deadly plots. “Privacy is very important,” Vincenzetti would say, “but national security is much more important.” National security professionals agreed!
Hacking Team was more like a religion than a business, and Vincenzetti a Godhead. These kinds of organizations “don’t have employees,” the visitor says.
“They have followers.”
a corporation’s sole purpose is to maximize shareholder profits. Period. Ethical worries were beside the point. When one of Hacking Team’s exploit developers suggested that perhaps they should be more careful about vetting their end users, a company executive shut him down.
There are five ‘legs’ of war: land, air, sea, space, and cyber. Cyber is becoming more and more lethal.
Hacking Team had sold its RCS spyware to more than twenty governments, nearly half of which were considered authoritarian regimes. A number of those regimes, such as the UAE and Morocco, appeared to have used RCS to spy on political dissidents and journalists.
“It wasn’t until they put an application into the system that allowed you to put data on a computer,” says one former Hacking Team contractor, “to put pedophile pictures onto somebody’s personal computer and then they arrest him. That’s when I was like ‘Shit, this is not good.’”
Hacking Team began to get the eerie sense that they, too, were being spied on.
THE FINAL BLOW to Vincenzetti—a live-by-the-sword, die-by-the sword blow—was heralded by an unexpected message posted on Hacking Team’s own Twitter account in the first dark hours of July 5, 2015. “Since we have nothing to hide,” read the tweet, “we’re publishing our emails, files, and source code.”
This hijacked tweet was almost two months in the making. A very patient and cautious hacker who called himself “Phineas Fisher” (he had already hacked the rival Gamma Group) would eventually take credit, publishing a technical explanation of how he found a vulnerability in the system software that pried open a back door into Hacking Team’s internal network.
400 gigabytes’ worth of internal emails, memos, and documents from Hacking Team servers—available to all, on a public site.
The millions of pages confirmed many of the worst tendencies in Hacking Team’s business practices, including sales to renowned violators of civil rights and human rights, as well as the defense of those sales.
Hacking Team employees told investigators that the old software was still in the system because one person was still using it—David Vincenzetti. “Literally,” said one, “because he couldn’t be bothered to install a software update.”
“You can see all the Hacking Team emails with the list of their clients right online, right?” says an Israeli software engineer who was working in cybersecurity at the time. “And I think that NSO was the big winner. It eliminated the competition.”
The [SMS messages] were pornography topics, where it was practically certain that they were going to click on it.
The cartels were getting precursor chemicals for mixing fentanyl from Asia, and laundering money through Spain, and buying guns from Austria and Italy and America.
more than twenty journalists already identified, from every major news outlet in Mexico,
Phineas had already been able to identify from his own contact files the mobile phone of an investigative reporter in Hungary who had been doing work critical of the right-wing, anti-immigrant prime minister Viktor Orbán.
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.
it appeared that somebody in Morocco had selected President Emmanuel Macron,
She had just days earlier verified that one of the numbers in the data belonged to Cecilio Pineda, the thirty-nine-year-old journalist whose 2017 murder in Guerrero remained unsolved. His phone number first appeared in the data two months before he was killed and again just two weeks before his death.
“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.”
“Everything we built over the decades and we consider a technology of liberation and self-determination,” he told a conference of hackers in 2016, “we discovered had been turned into a tool for repression as well. And it was inevitable.…”
“There is a technological imbalance between states and their citizens,”
“Security can no longer be a privilege in the hands of those few who can afford it,” he would say. “Security has to become a right; it has to be exercised and protected. It is the precondition for privacy, which is the key enabler for freedom of expression, which is a requirement for a healthy democracy.”
“They use Islam as an excuse to exploit their own people. This is in contradiction to fundamental Islamic teachings.”
As the states do with Christianity
Citizen Lab backed Claudio and Donncha with its own findings. And it all had very little impact.
NSO, meanwhile, did not even bother to contest any specifics in the Amnesty Tech report. The company simply released a mealy statement about how their technology is licensed to government agencies only, and only to help them thwart terrorists and criminals.
any technology bestowed as a tool of liberation could also be turned into a tool of repression.
the euphoria of initial discovery, the grinding effort of making new technology work on behalf of freedom, equality, and dignity, and the awful blowback when the state turned that technology
Hajar, a reporter at Akhbar al-Youm, was arrested with her fiancé while leaving her gynecologist’s office. The king’s prosecutors charged the couple with engaging in premarital sex and terminating a pregnancy, both criminal acts in Morocco. The trial required the twenty-eight-year-old Raissouni to submit to an unwanted and unnecessary gynecological examination. “It was an inhuman experience: imagine a ‘doctor’ forcibly inserting instruments into your vagina, without your consent,” Hajar told reporters from the French publications Mediapart and L’Humanité. “I was raped by the Moroccan state.”
Reputation is glass. Once it’s broken, you can’t put it back together.
“With the Arab Spring and the rise of social networks, young opponents acquired legitimacy and credibility,” Maati Monjib explained. “Designating them as traitors, thieves, rapists is the best way to silence them.”
“As a former senior foreign ministry official put it, this also shows that the ‘Eastern Opening’ eventually turned out to be just [a] ‘ninja smokescreen designed to conceal Hungarian graft and corruption.’ Hungary’s national economy hardly benefited from the pro-China turn in foreign policy, only business circles close to the government profited from it.”
Szabolcs had his calendar out, matching the timeline. He remembered he had been investigating the growing Trump-Orbán relationship, which involved a lot of talk of weapons sales.
“Yes, that story had a US angle and a Russian angle.”
“Hungarian as well,” Szabolcs explained. “And also some Israeli angle.
