By Kohinoor Dasgupta
February 14, 2023
Pegasus by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud, is a very important and frightening book about some very courageous people.
The Pegasus story is well known by now.
The Israeli "cybersecurity" firm responsible for developing and selling the spyware was called “NSO”. NSO would proudly say that it sold only to governments, and that Pegasus was being used ONLY to catch criminals such as drug traffickers, terrorists, and pedophiles. Turns out NSO wasn’t at all diligent in making sure that Pegasus was safe in squeaky-clean hands.
Forbidden Stories, a nine-person, Paris-based nonprofit, published the Pegasus investigation on July 18, 2021. As per their hush-hush and daring plan, the story dropped simultaneously in publications around the world. As their investigation progressed, Forbidden Stories had reached out to other media outlets for corroboration and local follow-up stories. The way Forbidden Stories tackled this investigation was a fitting geography-defying riposte to the shenanigans of NSO, who would causally enable the disruption and destruction of the lives of civilians such as journalists and social activists without ever having to set foot in their victims’ real worlds.
Rachel Maddow writes in her Introduction:
“Successfully deployed, Pegasus essentially owns a mobile phone; it can break down defenses built into a cell phone … without ever tipping off the owner… That includes all text and voice communications to and from the phone, location data, photos and videos, notes, browsing history, even turning on the camera and the microphone…”
There were consequences for NSO. However, many others have the capability to develop insidious code such as Pegasus, and huge fortunes are up for grabs. Why, all around the world, brilliant minds must be busy developing invisibility codes! What form will it take next? Who’ll be the targets? At what price for the rest of us? Only a Hercules can slay the Lernean Hydra! Maddow throws out the question: “Who is going to deliver us from this worldwide Orwellian nightmare?”
So, the book tells the story of how Forbidden Stories came by this disturbing one, and how, for almost one year, they worked with a growing circle of collaborators, in complete secrecy so as not to alert either NSO or their clients. It all began when an anonymous source, whose identity has been rigorously protected, tipped off Amnesty International’s Security Lab with a list of 50,000 mobile phone numbers that might have been targeted by Pegasus.
Amnesty loaned their young nerds, Claudio Guarnieri and Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, and the entire team began the work of trawling directories and databases to match the mobile phone numbers with names and locations. The potential victims were then sorted by country. (Mostly, these were non-democratic countries, India and Poland being the shocking exceptions.)
Owing to the secrecy of the project, it was impractical to imagine that publication could be held off for more than a year. The massive list had to be whittled down. The team concentrated on finding potential victims who might be willing to allow Guarnieri and Ó Cearbhaill to access their mobile phones, physically or remotely, for an "invasive digital forensic analysis”. The engineers were mainly studying iPhones, because Androids do not hold on for long to traces of "exploits" or sneaky intrusions. In other words, Guarnieri and Ó Cearbhaill had to suss out proof, clues lurking in code, or a smidgen of deviousness in naming the malicious Pegasus processes, such as ckkeyrollfd instead of Apple's legit ckkeyrolld. They also had to find links to NSO’s "anonymizing transmission network” of innocuous-sounding domains like alldaycooking and waffleswithnutella that were launchers of Pegasus.
Rigaud writes: "But while the Security Lab could show readers how the Pegasus cyber surveillance system worked, it would be up to Forbidden Stories and its partners to determine to determine why the end users chose their specific targets – and what were the consequences that befell those targets.”
The Forbidden Stories staffers, and Richard himself from well before he founded Forbidden Stories, had a background in investigative journalism, and as such had good hunches about possible targets in the countries widely known for their intolerance of dissidents, unfriendly journalists and social activists.
Here are some quotes from the book.
“I am about to finish three investigations. I will make sure to finish them before anything happens, if not, my editors and colleagues will finish and publish.” – Khadija Ismayilova
“She was part of a major national magazine. We thought she was protected.” – friend and colleague of Regina Martinez
“There is a technological imbalance between states and their citizens. Billions of dollars are poured into systems of surveillance both passive and active and not just by the United States but really by any government that is wealthy enough to do so. Credible defenses really lag behind or remain inaccessible, and generally are only available to corporations and businesses with deep enough pockets. The few ambitious public projects attempting to change things radically are often faced with rather unsustainable funding models, which rarely last long enough to grow these projects to maturity. And nation-states are very aware of this technological imbalance and use it to their advantage.”– Claudio Guarnieri to his fellow hackers.
“If I had to explain my upcoming travel plans, or some strange new safety precaution I wanted her to consider, I would shut down both of our cell phones and put them in the refrigerator or the microwave while we talked.” – Laurent Richard on keeping his wife in the dark about the Pegasus Project
***
Tennyson wrote the following lines about the temptation to be Lotos-eaters:
"On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind.
For they lie beside their nectar, and the bolts are hurl'd
Far below them in the valleys, and the clouds are lightly curl'd
Round their golden houses, girdled with the gleaming world:
Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands.
But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song
Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong,
Like a tale of little meaning tho' the words are strong;
Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,
Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil,
Storing yearly little dues of wheat, and wine and oil;
Till they perish ..."
***
Pegasus How A Spy In Your Pocket Threatens The End of Privacy, Dignity, And Democracy (2023)
By Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud
Published by Henry Holt and Company
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