Part 1: The Program
Part 2: Edward Snowden
Pegasus has existed since 2011. It is a spyware developed by the Israeli cyber-arms company NSO Group.
The Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said in 2019 - in ‘Exposing Pegasus’ part two, at 19 minutes and 37 seconds.
Quote
I decided several years ago to turn Israel into one of the five cyber powers of the world. In order for the companies to develop they need to make – what do they need to make? Money! They need to make money.
Now the easiest way to make sure that they don’t make money is one, high taxes, right? What’s the other one? Regulations! Have you ever heard of regulations? We have a problem with regulations. So the policy we have is to keep the taxes low and keep regulations low. Minimize regulations. There is no industry more susceptible and more inviting of regulations than cybersecurity. It’s like weapons. It is a weapon.
Almost all quotes in this part is from that video - so I won’t link to it again. You can find it above - and under ‘Links’ in the end.
Pegasus can be remotely installed on a phone running iOS and Android. They can send you an email and you don’t even have to open it to activate it.
Pegasus can turn any infected smartphone into a remote microphone and camera, spying on its owner while also offering Pegasus full access to files, messages, and pictures. It can record you - and show your location.
With Pegasus, you can look into almost any phone on the Earth - and no one is looking over your shoulder.
In 2020 the journalism non-profit Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International got access to a leaked list of over 50,000 phone numbers.
They suspected the list contained numbers selected for potential surveillance with spyware sold to governments by the Israeli company NSO Group.
Did you catch that? NSO sells it to governments! They claim to have 40 countries around the world buying their technology. They make bold claims that their technology is used to solve serious crimes – and that it is being used to find terrorists.
But there is no control over how countries use it.
Seventeen media organizations joined forces to investigate the phone list and after a year of investigation, they posted – simultaneously – in the Guardian, Washington Post, Le Monde, and FRONTLINE, among others.
They tried to get an interview with NSO Group but they declined.
Publicly the company has insisted that “it does not operate the systems it sells” and that it investigates “all credible claims of misuse” by its government clients.
Reporters from the seventeen media organizations met at Le Monde, in Paris – to plan the operation.
It’s a little distracting to see them all wearing masks! They apparently hadn’t investigated the Plandemic Hoax – or masks at least.
Masks had no effect in stopping an alleged virus. It looks more as if the purpose was to make people act like obedient sheep.
So it’s a little disturbing to see them wearing masks.
But it was also uplifting to see them all together. As one of them says, they usually see other reporters as competitors – and it was a new experience to work together, as a group.
They had the phone numbers – and could thereby find some of the targeted people. But they couldn’t know whether a phone had been hacked without conducting forensics on it.
So they had to involve a technician. On Amnesty International, a technician created a platform they could use to have phones analyzed – to see if Pegasus was installed.
They found several victims of surveillance. In the consulate of the Saudis in Istanbul a Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, was killed – and they found that his wife and fiancée’s phones were targeted.
In Mexico, a prominent journalist had Pegasus on her phone.
In Azerbaijan, an award-winning, investigative journalist also had Pegasus on her phone. She is an outspoken critic of her government.
It's both infuriating and heartbreaking to watch those people who find out they have Pegasus on their phones. As the Azerbaijan woman says:
I feel guilty. I feel guilty for the messages I’ve sent. I feel guilty for the information, sources have sent me – thinking that some encrypted messaging ways are secure – and they didn’t know that my phone is infected. My family members are also victimized … the sources are victimized … everyone. I mean people I’ve been working with. People who told me their private secrets are victimized. I mean Everyone. It’s not just me. I put so many people in danger. And … and I’m angry.
I’m angry with the government, I’m angry with the companies that produce all these tools.
It’s really … It’s despicable.
I was so relieved when she said she was angry. All the guilt she mentions is what we call neurotic guilt. She has done nothing wrong. Anger is what is necessary to push neurotic guilt away.
Good for her.
A heartbreaking example of how Pegasus can be used is about Princess Latifa – daughter of Dubai’s leader Sheikh Maktoum.
There are several clips of her sending videos to a friend in London, David Haig.
Her movement is very restricted and as she says, her father only cares about his own reputation.
She flees Dubai, changes transportation several times – and finally, she’s on a yacht to Goa, in India. But the boat is boarded by her father's men, and she is forced back to Dubai where she is held captive in a room with locked windows and doors – and police outside.
Forbidden Knowledge finds her phone number on the list – as well as the numbers of some of her friends and associates. They can’t get hold of Latifas phone, but they make a forensic analysis of the other phones – one of them being David Haig’s - and Pegasus is installed on all of them the day she fled Dubai.
Quote David Haig
The fact that you can be hacked on British soil, and that they can do that, it’s, it’s frightening. It really is.
Yes, it really is. So the ones that buy Pegasus can spy on whomever they want – wherever they want to.
Her father stated, that she was kidnapped by criminals and she was rescued from that boat and brought home to safety in Dubai.
David Haig from Detained International informs, that he founded the Campaign to free the Dubai Princess in 2018. That is two years before she fled Dubai. So she was held prisoner for at least two years before she tried to escape.
The documentary tells nothing about what happened to Latifa after she was kidnapped back to Dubai. I found this article describing how she met with a UN High Commissioner for Human Rights – in Paris - and apparently said she is free to move around as she wants.
Quote David Haig
We can’t let NSO and the governments that abuse their system, get away with what they’ve done. Because if we do, and if nothing happens, and people are not brought to justice, people are not put in jail and people are not taken to court, the next company and the next company, and the next company wherever they may be, will do exactly the same. And it will just carry on but get worse.
Amitai Ziv is an Israeli journalist. He tells about how Israel develops and deploys high-tech surveillance technology. They recruit soldiers who have served in army computer units into civilian high-tech companies. Unit 8200 is one of those units they recruit from. They deal with cyber attacks by the Israeli army.
Quote a former 8200 member (voice distortion and person in shadow)
Israel has this advantage of not only developing technologies and weaponry, but testing it live. And this is something Israel knows it can use to sell outside. When you want to control a huge population like we do with Palestinians, you have to have assets everywhere. So everyone can be a target because you don’t want only the, I don’t know, terrorist from Hamas, but also maybe his neighbor, or his cousin, or the person who sells milk in the corner of the street.
If you want to recruit human agents, you need to collect their weaknesses, things you can use to blackmail. And so part of what 8200 does is to collect this blackmail, potential information about everybody.
One of my personal musings is about why our Prime Minister went to Israel when we were in the first lockdown? There was a lot of speculation – but no answers.
Then I heard this:
Quote Amitai Ziv
We found a correlation between Netanyahu’s visits to certain countries or foreign leaders’ visits to Israel and the first day of implementation of the NSO system in the countries in question. […] That correlation cannot be ignored.
This made me speculate about the spies on my phone and laptop – as described in Part 14.
They've been on my laptop for over a year. Sometimes the mouse moves around the screen without me touching anything. Sometimes the image flickers on a video – or loses sound. Sometimes, the camera turns on when I tap the facebook ikon on the phone - with a black screen. For half a year, there has been harassment when I call my daughter – a male voice talking in the background or noise and scratches. This is only when I call my daughter - or she calls me. Otherwise, the phone works fine.
This was harassment. Probably aimed at scaring me. When I got a VPN it stopped.
Now I’ve checked the dates and it started a few weeks after our Prime visited Israel.
I know correlation is not causation. But as Ziv said: “Correlation cannot be ignored.”
Maybe it wasn’t Pegasus. Maybe it was the CIA – who is also spying, of course.
And so is the FBI … They purchased Pegasus in 2018. When Wray was asked behind closed doors in the House if the FBI had ever purchased and used Pegasus, he said, that they had bought a licence for Pegasus - but only for research and development, to be able to figure out how bad guys could use it.
A transscript of this hearing was recently declassified. According to this video, he lied. They have used it.
From the start, the Forbidden Stories had decided to investigate for a year. The deadline, July 18 2021, was getting closer and they knew the last two weeks before the publication was the most dangerous phase. When they knock on the door to NSO Group and say:
Quote Laurent Richard, Forbidden Stories
Hey, we are Forbidden Stories, we are 80 reporters, we investigate your businesses and we have evidence of a global misuse, that is threatening democracy. […]
They can blackmail the source. They can hack me or one of the team, they can follow us, they can come into our offices.
They had done forensics on over 60 phones, connected to numbers on the list – and had forensic proof that at least 37 phones had been targeted or infected with Pegasus.
They sent an official request for comment from the 80 reporters with dozens of questions inside. They gave NSO a deadline. Four days before publication Laurent Richard called them and asked if they were going to get answers? - and an email arrived, which said – in Laurents interpretation: “All you think is wrong. Thank you. Best regards.” In reality the email said:
NSO Group firmly denies false claims made in your report which many of them are uncorroborated theories that raise serious doubts about the reliability of your sources, as well as the basis of your story.
The next morning NSO group sent letters from lawyers to most of the partners, simultaneously. They basically threatened them – “If you publish anything, we will sue you.”
If you want to smile it’s a big moment at 37m24s here – when they all press ‘Send’ simultaneously. Several continents, several languages – and a lot of media are following up on the story.
Quote Dana Priest, Washington Post
They’ve made a bigger deal than I would have expected against not just an Israeli company, but really they’re criticizing the Israeli government for allowing this to happen. Because it could actually not happen without the Israeli government’s permission.
As Senator Wyden says: “You have here a go-to service for tyrants.”
He, by the way, has been a fierce fighter against surveillance as we shall see in the next part about the CIA’s spying, revealed by Wikileaks.
One good thing that came out of this was, that Apple and WhatsApp sued NSO Group.
All we saw from NSO Group was “deny, deny, deny”.
Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp said, that of course tech companies can and should do everything they can to make their software as secure as possible. But …
[…] at the end of the day, if there are no consequences for people who try to break that software to commit human rights abuses, then there will always be people trying to do it. It’s just like the only solution to stopping bank robbery is not to have the best technology in banks. Yeah, you do that too. It’s also that bank rubbers get caught and have consequences for trying to rob banks. And we need that for the spyware industry.
Pegasus spying kept popping up in different countries – and the European Parliament called Pegasus to answer questions from the politicians.
In case you don’t know: The European Parliament has elected members – in contrast to the rest of EU who looks like Cabal puppets to me.
And the spokesperson from Israel answered every question with:
I cannot, and again, I repeat, I cannot because of various confidentiality and secrecy issues, I cannot get into specific questions regarding a specific customer or specific cases.
When he for the fifth time says “again” one of the questioners has had enough and says:
Not “again” It was a new question, so please.
He stammers a little when he tries to avoid replying to the question, about whether or not Hungary is a secure country. A woman interrupts, in an angry voice.
You did consider it secure, because you sold the stuff to them.
One of the Parliament asks for respectful questions. And another woman says in a very calm voice
You keep repeating the same thing. And there seems to be a complete disconnect between reality and between what you are saying. This is like, you know, it’s an insult to our intelligence. Sorry.
The meeting is over. His fascial expression (picture above) and his body language when he leaves the room is a beaten man.
Well deserved.
At least he apparently has some shame.
The next day, several executives leave the company. They also take a big financial hit.
Hulio, the CEO, goes on television and plays the victim card. He calls the reported stories “a blatant lie.”
Two months later, he resigns.
Quote Dana Priest, The Washington Post
The bottom line is nobody regulates these companies. That’s the bottom line. Technology is just so far ahead of government regulation and even of public understanding of what’s happening out there.
Yes. It’s a military weapon used against civilians. There is no control over how countries use it.
And countries use it with no regards to the Constitutions.
One good thing happened though, Biden blacklisted NSO Group …
But what the heck – no big deal for that Cabal puppet. He has the CIA, to do his dirty work.
Links
Global spyware scandal – Pegasus – Part 1
Global spyware scandal – Pegasus – Part 2
Previous investigation of Pegasus
FBI purchased Pegasus in 2018 (and Wray lied to Congress)
Latifa met with Human Rights Commissioner
https://news.sky.com/story/princess-latifa-says-she-is-living-as-she-wishes-as-she-is-pictured-with-un-commissioner-12544969
Reagan EO broadens power of CIA 1981
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/12/05/us/reagan-broadens-power-of-cia-allowing-spying-activities-in-us.html
And a Danish article
Kritik af Mette Frederiksens rejse til Israel i Marts 2021
https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/politik/bred-kritik-af-mette-frederiksen-israel-rejse-var-helt-uforstaaelig-og-en
Another eye opener Jytte! It’s very scary. This evil has to come to an end.
Nicely done. I was in the dark about this.
👏🏼👏🏼❤️
Disgusting! More spying. More lies by governments. We truly are cast members of movie, The Truman Show, with fake all around us. 🤬 One day soon I hope to see truth everywhere like you write about, Jytte.