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

by Laurent Richard

Researchers in Toronto had documented Pegasus spyware attacks against about twenty people there, including reporters, human rights lawyers, opposition politicians, and even the outspoken parents of one of the student-teachers taken off the bus and murdered by a drug cartel in Ayotzinapa. When Shalev and Omri refused to speak to any specific charges but suggested instead a nefarious anti-Semitic plot afoot within Citizen Lab, Israeli government apparatchiks joined the chorus singing cabal and conspiracy. “I can tell you that’s for sure that we see the fingerprints and footprints of anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic elements [at Citizen Lab],” says one of Netanyahu’s key advisers from the time, without adducing a whit of evidence.

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.”

🙄 these are USA values

As long as Azerbaijan helped feed the gaping maw of the European oil and gas market and spread the profits among a handful of powerful European and American corporations, nobody was going to deny him much of what he wanted. Or call him out too loudly on his most heinous behavior.

Ethics officials in the US waved off the fact that SOCAR had spent $750,000 to wine and dine American congressmen at the recent “US-Azerbaijan: Vision for the Future” conference. Members of the congressional delegation had been gifted silk scarves, crystal tea sets, rugs, and free travel. Lobbyists in the US and Europe happily accepted millions of dollars to quash a damning report on political prisoners in Azerbaijan. Aliyev’s operatives reportedly spent €30 million to persuade members of the Council of Europe, whose sole mission was to bolster democracy on the continent, to ignore the long and continuing Azeri record of human rights violations.

the European Investment Bank signed off on a €930 million loan for the pipeline. “The EIB did not condition the loan on the improvement of human rights,” wrote Human Rights Watch, “even though its obligations under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights mean it should not finance projects that would encourage or support human rights violations.”

So tight-lipped were the officials at the top of NSO, in fact, that they even kept the identity of potential clients from the members of the company’s new outside human rights advisers who were supposed to provide guidance in vetting potential clients and in investigating claims of misuse.

The Saudi rulers might be anti-democratic and serial violators of human rights, and even outright murderers, but they were becoming more aggressive in their efforts to help with what Israel most desired—checking Iranian power.

Le Monde. The Guardian. The Wire. The Washington Post. Die Zeit. Süddeutsche Zeitung. Knack. Daraj. Direkt36. Aristegui Noticias. Proceso

NSO and its defenders had by then opened its playbook to a dog-eared, oft-used page. Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International were either leaders of, or tools of, an anti-Israel, anti-Semitic conspiracy, they suggested.

“The United States,” said Commerce Secretary Gina M. Raimondo, “is committed to aggressively using export controls to hold companies accountable that develop, traffic, or use technologies to conduct malicious activities that threaten the cybersecurity of members of civil society, dissidents, government officials, and organizations here and abroad.”

Hypocrisy