From Mexico to India, via Azerbaijan, the obsession with monitoring journalists

Posted today at 6:00 p.m., updated at 6:00 p.m.

Azerbaijan, Togo, Bahrain, Mexico: All of these Pegasus users, and many more, have in common that they target journalists with powerful Israeli spyware. For years, organizations such as Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) have denounced the use of such software against them.

The “Project Pegasus” revelations, based on the analysis of a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers selected by NSO Group customers for possible targeting by the Israeli firm’s spyware, and transmitted by Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International in sixteen editors, including that of World, show that the espionage of journalists does not only concern autocratic countries, such as Azerbaijan.

Focus on investigative journalists

Democracies also watch investigative journalists, in Mexico or India, and even in Europe, Hungary. Some states, such as Morocco, do not hesitate to target foreign journalists either. In France, the Moroccan services thus took an interest in the telephones of journalists from the World, of Mediapart, France Télévisions or Radio France, to name only a small part of the targets.

The “Project Pegasus” revelations are the latest in a long list of attacks on journalists, carried out using NSO Group spyware. Previous investigations had already shown that dozens of contributors to the Mexican press had been spied on in this way. In 2020, technical analyzes carried out by experts at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, Canada, showed that thirty-six journalists and executives from a subsidiary of the Qatari television channel Al-Jazeera had been attacked by Pegasus. . The same year, Amnesty International demonstrated that the Moroccan journalist’s phone Omar Radi had also been infected with spyware.

Prohibited but regular uses

Faced with these illegal uses of its software, NSO Group has, over the years, adopted several lines of defense, arguing both that each customer is responsible for the proper use of its software, and that rigorous control procedures and internal audits were conducted to prevent, in particular, journalists from being illegally targeted.

After the assassination of Saudi columnist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, when Pegasus was suspected of having been used by the kingdom’s authorities to track him down, NSO Group CEO Shalev Hulio strongly denied any involvement. A client who uses Pegasus for anything other than fighting crime and terrorism would risk a “Immediate, decisive and uncompromising sanction” from NSO, he said. Analysis of the data, shared by Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International with the 16 media partners of “Project Pegasus”, clearly shows that spyware exploits against journalists are not accidents.

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