How Tyrants Use Tech to Spy on All of Us
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Parmy Olson: You're the co-authors of a new book, “Pegasus: How a Spy In Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy,” which tells the story of Pegasus, a powerful spyware developed by the Israeli cybersecurity firm NSO Group. In recent years, a range of governments around the world purchased this technology, allowing them to gain remote-control access to people's mobile phones without their knowledge. In 2020, a secret source leaked a list to your team of investigative journalists in Paris that contained 50,000 phone numbers that NSO Group's clients wanted to spy on. Among the names on the list were French president Emmanuel Macron, the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi and a raft of journalists, including your own colleagues.
Your book provides the inside account of how you led an international consortium of journalists that cracked open the story, a collaborative effort called The Pegasus Project. If readers could take away one idea from your book, what would it to be?
Laurent Richard: By gaining access to this list, we revealed, for the very first time, the true faces of the victims of cyber-surveillance. We showed how these technologies have been massively misused by state actors against journalists, human rights defenders, lawyers, political opponents – and how the Pegasus spyware became a kind of magic tool for tyrants and dictators to track dissidents and any kind of people who might challenge their power.
Sandrine Rigaud: It's crucial for readers to understand the power of this tool. It can access everything you have in your phone, in a totally invisible way. You don't have to do anything wrong. You don't have to click on anything
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