All of us worry about the security of our phones and devices, especially as an increasing amount of our lives and data reside on them. But for some people, the consequences of a hacked phone can mean more than stolen bank information or embarrassing photos ending up online. For activists or journalists living under an authoritarian regime, it can mean threats, imprisonment, or even death.
For people in those situations, the mobile spyware known as Pegasus is a nightmare. With its zero-click exploit, the victim doesn’t need to click on even a single link—and once the phone is infected, all privacy is gone. It’s as if someone is standing over your shoulder, watching everything you do and say, every single second of the day.
The company that makes Pegasus is an Israeli-based firm called NSO Group. The intent behind their sophisticated spyware is to prevent and combat evil acts. As they state on their website, “NSO products are used exclusively by government intelligence and law enforcement agencies to fight crime and terror.” Should a government entity wish to purchase the software, a rigorous vetting process is in place. NSO Group also says that “there are 100 countries that we will never sell our technologies to.”
In a two-part documentary called Global Spyware Scandal: Exposing Pegasus, NSO Group is scrutinized and its motives questioned.
Headed by Forbidden Stories (a non-profit in Paris) and Amnesty International, the project took off when Forbidden Stories obtained a leaked list of over 50,000 phone numbers. These numbers are believed to have been “selected for potential surveillance with [Pegasus] spyware.”
This leaked list is a chance to dig deeper into how this powerful spyware is used. Do government entities strictly use it to combat crime and terror, or do they use it as a weapon to stomp out critics, dissidents, and anyone else deemed a political nuisance? As one critic of NSO Group puts it, “There is no control over how countries use [Pegasus], and they have been using it in the worst way you could imagine.”
Filmed over the course of a year, the documentary follows journalists from 17 news organizations as they try to meet a self-imposed deadline for publishing their exposé. For this project, newspaper rivalries are put on hold; this project is about “one group, one role.”
As the journalists go to work—trying to figure out who the numbers on the list belong to, and why they might be on there—they discover Pegasus on the phones of everyone from high-ranking French politicians to prominent Mexican journalists. And from its The documentary dedicates most of its time to shining a spotlight on half a dozen of these stories.
One of those stories is the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the journalist and critic of Mohammed Bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s young crown prince. Murdered inside the Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul, Khashoggi’s death sparked a flurry of outrage across the world. Though known as a reformer of Saudi Arabia, the crown prince is also fiercely hostile to criticism. (Unsurprisingly, Bin Salman has denied any involvement in the murder.)
Nonetheless, journalists and technicians find strong evidence for this. They meet with Khashoggi’s former fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, and are able to analyze her phone. Sure enough, Pegasus spyware is on it.
In another story, nefarious uses of Pegasus focus on Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who’s both the prime minister of the UAE and the ruler of Dubai. In 2018, his daughter, Princess Latifa, attempted to escape the stifling, heavy-handed atmosphere of her father’s regime. She was ultimately caught, forcibly brought back home, and put in a barred room with police officers outside.
Is this another gross misuse of Pegasus? Journalists were unable to examine Princess Latifa’s phones to determine if Pegasus was on it; but they were able to find evidence that Pegasus was on the phones of many of her friends and associates. The phone of David Haigh—a British human rights activist who had been closely covering the story of Princess Latifa—was even found to be infected with the spyware. If the ruler of Dubai would use Pegasus in this manner regarding his own daughter, what other purposes would it use it for?
Global Spyware Scandal succeeds in making the case that Pegasus can be, and has been, put to malicious use. But that’s not particularly surprising. In fact, of course it has. What sophisticated piece of technology isn’t used for both noble and evil ends?
The usefulness of this otherwise in-depth documentary is diminished by the fact that Pegasus is rarely, if ever, put into a broader context. It’s treated as if it’s some sui generis cybersurveillance tool: a unique menace to democracy and human rights, produced by a singularly unique company, and deployed by especially heinous villains.
If only it were that simple.
What about widespread abuses of the Patriot Act? What about the NSA spying on American citizens? What about the vast array of sophisticated surveillance apparatuses at work every single second of the day, performing many of the same kinds of invasive acts that Pegasus does.
None of that makes the malicious uses of Pegasus acceptable; none of that absolves NGO Group if they aren’t in fact living up to the standards of their vetting process. But in a two-hour documentary, one would hope that a few minutes might be spared in order to situate Pegasus into the broader context of cybersurveillance.
The irony of this narrow presentation is especially noticeable when a brief clip is shown of a U.S. politician: “You have here a go-to spy service [i.e. Pegasus] for tyrants.” There’s undoubtedly truth in that, but the documentary undermines its authenticity by implying that NSO Group has somehow uniquely failed to do the right thing in situations that are supposedly black and white. That’s silly.
The U.S. government, after all, sells billions of dollars of weapons to Saudi Arabia. That’s the very same regime, headed by the very same tyrant (Mohammend Bin Salman), who presumably had Khashoggi killed. Some of those weapons are currently being used in the war against Yemen—a war that has taken the lives of tens of thousands of civilians. Yet the documentary is framed in such a way that NSO Group’s spyware is a particularly unique blight on geopolitics, democracy, and human rights. It’s not.
The in-depth investigations carried out by the dozens of journalists involved in the project is admirable. But the documentary itself never zooms out, never explores the potential upsides of a tool like Pegasus, and never seems to acknowledge the enormously complex questions and debates that surround the pros and cons of 21st-century cybersurveillance. No matter one’s stance on these issues, a one-dimensional documentary is still exactly that.
Spectatio 