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

by Laurent Richard

The most active client state by far was Mexico, with more than fifteen thousand separate numbers selected for possible targeting.

The large-scale, unchecked, systematic abuse of cybersurveillance weapons was a clear and present danger to the most basic human rights, including privacy, political dissent, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press; it was a threat to democracy itself, at a time when the world’s most stable democracies were under relentless attack from without and from within.

Both completed their compulsory service in the Israeli military and then some, though neither had served in the elite counterintelligence force—Unit 8200.

“Israel receives roughly one-fifth of the world’s global private investment in cybersecurity,” Netanyahu said in 2017. “And given that we are one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population, it means we’re punching about two hundred times above our weight. Not two times, not ten times, and not even one hundred times. Two hundred times above our weight.