GLOBAL SURVEILLANCE, POLITICS & A MURDER MACHINE
Salvadorian Gang Member
The F.B.I. had bought a version of PEGASUS, NSO’s premier spying tool. For nearly a decade, the Israeli firm had been selling its surveillance software on a subscription basis to law-enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world, promising that it could do what no one else — not a private company, not even a state intelligence service — could do: consistently and reliably crack the encrypted communications of any iPhone or Android smartphone.
THE SET UP
In June 2019, three Israeli computer engineers arrived at a New Jersey building used by the F.B.I. They unpacked dozens of computer servers, arranging them on tall racks in an isolated room. As they set up the equipment, the engineers made a series of calls to their bosses in Herzliya, a Tel Aviv suburb, at the headquarters for NSO Group, the world’s most notorious maker of spyware. Then, with their equipment in place, they began testing.
A WEAPON OF MASS SURVEILLANCE
PEGASUS has helped Mexican authorities capture Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug lord known as El Chapo. European investigators have quietly used Pegasus to thwart terrorist plots, fight organized crime and, in one case, take down a global child-abuse ring, identifying dozens of suspects in more than 40 countries.
In a broader sense, NSO’s products seemed to solve one of the biggest problems facing law-enforcement and intelligence agencies in the 21st century: that criminals and terrorists had better technology for encrypting their communications than investigators had to decrypt them. The criminal world had gone dark even as it was increasingly going global.
Phantom allows American law enforcement and spy agencies to get intelligence “by extracting and monitoring crucial data from mobile devices.” It is an “independent solution” that requires no cooperation from AT&T, Verizon, Apple or Google. The system, it says, will “turn your target’s smartphone into an intelligence gold mine.”
The Phantom presentation triggered a discussion among government lawyers at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. that lasted two years, across two presidential administrations, centering on a basic question: Could deploying Phantom inside the United States run afoul of long established wiretapping laws?
THE PANTOM & AMERICAN LAW ENFORCEMENT
THE NEW ARMS TRADE
have changed international relations more profoundly than any advance since the advent of the atomic bomb. In some ways, they are even more profoundly destabilizing — they are comparatively cheap, easily distributed and can be deployed without consequences to the attacker. Dealing with their proliferation is radically changing the nature of state relations, as Israel long ago discovered and the rest of the world is now also beginning to understand.
Selling weapons for diplomatic ends has long been a tool of statecraft. Foreign-service officers posted in American Embassies abroad have served for years as pitchmen for defense firms hoping to sell arms to their client states, as the thousands of diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks in 2010 showed; when American defense secretaries meet with their counterparts in allied capitals, the end result is often the announcement of an arms deal that pads the profits of Lockheed Martin or CyberweaponsRaytheon.
MEMBERS OF THE FABLED UNIT 8200
As with purveyors of conventional weapons, cyberweapons makers are required to obtain export licenses from Israel’s Ministry of Defense to sell their tools abroad, providing a crucial lever for the government to influence the firms and, in some cases, the countries that buy from them.
ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE & ARMS DEALERS
By the mid-1980s, Israel had firmly established itself as one of the world’s top arms exporters, with an estimated one in 10 of the nation’s workers employed by the industry in some way.
All of this bought good will for Israel from select foreign leaders, who saw the military aid as essential to preserving their own power.
In turn, those countries often voted in Israel’s favor at the United Nations General Assembly, the Security Council and other international forums. They also allowed the Mossad and the Israel Defense Forces to use their countries as bases to launch operations against Arab nations.
As cyberweapons began to eclipse fighter jets in the schemes of military planners, a different kind of weapons industry emerged in Israel.
Veterans of Unit 8200 — Israel’s equivalent of the National Security Agency — poured into secretive start-ups in the private sector, giving rise to a multibillion dollar cybersecurity industry.
PEGASUS & THE HUNT FOR EL CHAPO
Investigators at an office of the Center for Investigation and National Security, or CISEN, now called the Center for National Investigation — went to work with one of the Pegasus machines. They fed the mobile phone number of a person connected to Joaquín Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel into the system, and the BlackBerry was successfully attacked. Investigators could see the content of the messages, as well as the locations of different BlackBerry devices. “Suddenly we started to see and hear anew,” says a former CISEN leader. “It was like magic.”
More disturbing, it appeared that someone in the government had used Pegasus to spy on lawyers working to untangle the massacre of 43 students in Iguala in 2014. Tomás Zerón de Lucio, the chief of the Mexican equivalent to the F.B.I., was a main author of the federal government’s version of the event, which concluded that the students were killed by a local gang. But in 2016 he became the subject of an investigation himself, on suspicion that he had covered up federal involvement in the events there. Now it appeared that he might have used Pegasus in that effort — one of his official duties was to sign off on the procurement of cyberweapons and other equipment.
In 2017, researchers at Citizen Lab, a watchdog group based at the University of Toronto, reported that authorities in Mexico had used Pegasus to hack the accounts of advocates for a soda tax, as part of a broader campaign aimed at human rights activists, political opposition movements and journalists.
SINISTER CONNECTIONS & SURVEILLANCE
ISRAEL, PEGASUS, AND THE MIDDLE EAST
Arguably the most fruitful alliances made with Pegasus’s help have been those between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
Israel first authorized the sale of the system to the U.A.E. as something of an olive branch, after Mossad agents poisoned a senior Hamas operative in a Dubai hotel room in 2010. It was not the assassination itself that infuriated Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, the de facto Emirati leader, so much as it was that the Israelis had carried it out on Emirati soil. The prince, widely known as M.B.Z., ordered that security ties between Israel and the U.A.E. be severed. In 2013, by way of a truce, M.B.Z. was offered the opportunity to buy Pegasus. He readily agreed.
THE FUTURE CYBER-WEAPONSOF
PEGASUS is a three-part investigative documentary series on the new arms race, inside the world of high-level surveillance software, where intelligence, data, and privacy is a game of intrigue and has ramifications across the world in terms of geopolitical strategy and the future of warfare.
On the domestic front, and the global criminal underworld, the advent of Pegasus and Phantom is a game-changer for cops and criminals alike. This story will usher the viewer into a new world, that connects the dots on intelligence agencies, the private sector and rogue governments that can now intrude inside any communication network.