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pegasus
Amnesty Details 'Shocking' Allegations of India Targeting Reporters With Pegasus Spyware
"Increasingly, journalists in India face the threat of unlawful surveillance simply for doing their jobs," said one advocate.
Dec 28, 2023
Amnesty International on Thursday demanded transparency from the Indian government regarding its contracts with surveillance companies, including the Israeli firm NSO Group, after the rights organization joined The Washington Post in publishing what it called "shocking new details" about the use of spyware to target journalists in India.
Amnesty's Security Lab revealed that a round of "state-sponsored attacker" notifications that were sent to Apple customers in October by the tech company went to more than 20 Indian journalists including Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor of The Wire, and Anand Mangnale, South Asia editor at the Organized Crime and Corruption Report Project (OCCRP).
The Security Lab ran a forensic analysis of the two reporters' devices and found evidence that the NSO Group's highly invasive Pegasus spyware, which is capable of eavesdropping on phone calls and harvesting data, had been installed on phones owned by Varadarajan and Mangnale.
In Mangnale's case, the journalist appeared to have received a "zero-click exploit" via iMessage on August 23, allowing the individual or group who sent it to covertly install Pegasus spyware on his phone without requiring Mangnale to take any action, such as clicking a link.
At the time of the attempted attack, said Amnesty, Mangnale was working on a story about alleged stock manipulation by a major Indian multinational firm with ties to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The journalist told Agence France Presse that his phone was targeted "within hours" of his sending interview questions to the company.
The timing of the attack—and the fact that NSO Group has said it only licenses Pegasus to governments and security agencies—was "a hell of a coincidence," Mangnale said.
"Targeting journalists solely for doing their work amounts to an unlawful attack on their privacy and violates their right to freedom of expression," said Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, head of Amnesty's Security Lab. "All states, including India, have an obligation to protect human rights by protecting people from unlawful surveillance."
The Indian government was previously accused of targeting journalists, opposition politicians, and activists with Pegasus in 2021, when leaked documents showed the spyware had attacked more than 1,000 phone numbers.
India has fallen 21 spots to 161 out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders' World Press Freedom Index since Modi took office in 2014. In addition to the alleged use of spyware by the government, journalists have been arrested and detained while covering anti-government protests, and reporters have been targeted by coordinated social media campaigns inciting hatred and violence.
Varadarajan was the subject of an earlier report by Amnesty, which documented how he had previously been targeted by Pegasus spyware in 2018.
This past October the same email address used in the Pegasus attack on Mangnale was identified on Varadarajan's phone, confirming he was targeted again.
Varadarajan toldThe Washington Post that at the time of the most recent covert spyware installation, he had been leading public opposition to the detention of a news publisher in New Delhi.
"Our latest findings show that increasingly, journalists in India face the threat of unlawful surveillance simply for doing their jobs, alongside other tools of repression including imprisonment under draconian laws, smear campaigns, harassment, and intimidation," said Ó Cearbhaill.
The group called for the Indian Supreme Court to immediately release the findings of a technical committee report on Pegasus, which was completed in 2022 but has still not been made public.
"Despite repeated revelations," said Ó Cearbhaill, "there has been a shameful lack of accountability about the use of Pegasus spyware in India which only intensifies the sense of impunity over these human rights violations."
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Snowden Warns Today's Surveillance Technology Makes 2013 Look Like 'Child's Play'
"We trusted the government not to screw us," said Edward Snowden. "But they did. We trusted the tech companies not to take advantage of us. But they did. That is going to happen again, because that is the nature of power."
Jun 08, 2023
With this week marking 10 years since whistleblower Edward Snowden disclosed information to journalists about widespread government spying by United States and British agencies, the former National Security Agency contractor on Thursday joined other advocates in warning that the fight for privacy rights, while making several inroads in the past decade, has grown harder due to major changes in technology.
"If we think about what we saw in 2013 and the capabilities of governments today," Snowden told The Guardian, "2013 seems like child's play."
Snowden said that the advent of commercially available surveillance products such as Ring cameras, Pegasus spyware, and facial recognition technology has posed new dangers.
As Common Dreams has reported, the home security company Ring has faced legal challenges due to security concerns and its products' vulnerability to hacking, and has faced criticism from rights groups for partnering with more than 1,000 police departments—including some with histories of police violence—and leaving community members vulnerable to harassment or wrongful arrests.
Law enforcement agencies have also begun using facial recognition technology to identify crime suspects despite the fact that the software is known to frequently misidentify people of color—leading to the wrongful arrest and detention earlier this year of Randal Reid in Georgia, among other cases.
"Despite calls over the last few years for federal legislation to rein in Big Tech companies, we've seen nothing significant in limiting tech companies' ability to collect data."
Last month, journalists and civil society groups called for a global moratorium on the sale and transfer of spyware like Pegasus, which has been used to target dozens of journalists in at least 10 countries.
Protecting the public from surveillance "is an ongoing process," Snowden told The Guardian on Thursday. "And we will have to be working at it for the rest of our lives and our children's lives and beyond."
In 2013, Snowden revealed that the U.S. government was broadly monitoring the communications of citizens, sparking a debate over surveillance as well as sustained privacy rights campaigns from groups like Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Fight for the Future.
"Technology has grown to be enormously influential," Snowden told The Guardian on Thursday. "We trusted the government not to screw us. But they did. We trusted the tech companies not to take advantage of us. But they did. That is going to happen again, because that is the nature of power."
Last month ahead of the anniversary of Snowden's revelations, EFF noted that some improvements to privacy rights have been made in the past decade, including:
- The sunsetting of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, which until 2020 allowed the U.S. government to conduct a dragnet surveillance program that collected billions of phone records;
- The emergence of end-to-end encryption of internet communications, which Snowden noted was "a pipe dream in 2013";
- The end of the NSA's bulk collection of internet metadata, including email addresses of senders and recipients; and
- Rulings in countries including South Africa and Germany against bulk data collection.
The group noted that privacy advocates are still pushing Congress to end Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which permits the warrantless surveillance of Americans' communications, and "to take privacy seriously," particularly as tech companies expand spying capabilities.
"Despite calls over the last few years for federal legislation to rein in Big Tech companies, we've seen nothing significant in limiting tech companies' ability to collect data... or regulate biometric surveillance, or close the backdoor that allows the government to buy personal information rather than get a warrant, much less create a new Church Committee to investigate the intelligence community's overreaches," wrote EFF senior policy analyst Matthew Guariglia, executive director Cindy Cohn, and assistant director Andrew Crocker. "It's why so many cities and states have had to take it upon themselves to ban face recognition or predictive policing, or pass laws to protect consumer privacy and stop biometric data collection without consent."
"It's been 10 years since the Snowden revelations," they added, "and Congress needs to wake up and finally pass some legislation that actually protects our privacy, from companies as well as from the NSA directly."
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Journalists, Rights Groups Urge Ban on 'Sinister' Spyware Like Pegasus
"The use of spyware and unlawful targeted surveillance violates the fundamental rights of freedom of expression and access to information, peaceful assembly and association, freedom of movement, and privacy."
May 03, 2023
Six dozen civil society groups, journalists, and experts marked World Press Freedom Day on Wednesday with a joint call for "all governments to implement an immediate moratorium on the export, sale, transfer, servicing, and use of digital surveillance technologies, as well as a ban on abusive commercial spyware technology and its vendors."
The use of spyware against media workers is "an alarming trend impacting freedom of the press and creating a wider chilling effect on civil society and civic space," the statement argues. "Privacy, source protection, and digital security are essential components of press freedom, allowing journalists to protect the confidentiality and integrity of their work and sources."
"As governments and other entities seek to suppress the press and silence dissent, we are seeing an exponential increase in the market for digital surveillance technologies, including spyware, that overrides these journalistic principles."
"As governments and other entities seek to suppress the press and silence dissent, we are seeing an exponential increase in the market for digital surveillance technologies, including spyware, that overrides these journalistic principles," the statement continues. Such tools "can infiltrate a target's phone, giving the attacker full access to emails, messages, contacts, and even the device's microphone and camera," rendering secure and encrypted platforms useless.
"From El Salvador to Mexico, from India to Azerbaijan, from Hungary to Morocco, to Ethiopia—the list goes on of countries where investigative journalists working to expose corruption, power abuses, or human rights violations, have been targeted by invasive spyware such as Pegasus," the statement adds, referencing spyware from the Israeli firm NSO Group that has been used to target reporters, dissidents, and world leaders.
The advocates of banning this type of surveilleance technology noted that there are at least 180 known cases of potentially targeted journalists across 21 countries. They pointed to multiple examples, including Hungary-based Andras Szabo and Szabolcs Panyi being targeted with Pegasus in 2019, and Raymond Mujuni and Canary Mugume facing the same spyware two years later in Uganda.
According to the statement:
Moroccan investigative journalist Omar al-Radi was targeted with Pegasus spyware between 2019 and 2021, and later sentenced to six years in prison on bogus rape and espionage charges. Meanwhile journalist Hicham Mansouri, who fled from Morocco to France in 2016 following state harassment and detention, was hacked by Pegasus at least 20 times between February and April 2021.
Perhaps the most infamous example of how spyware can facilitate and enable transnational repression and serious human rights violations, including enforced disappearance and extrajudicial killing, is the murder of Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi at the Consulate of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul on October 2, 2018. Both prior to and after his death, Mr. Kashoggi's family members and acquaintances were targeted by Pegasus spyware.
"It is clear that the use of spyware and unlawful targeted surveillance violates the fundamental rights of freedom of expression and access to information, peaceful assembly and association, freedom of movement, and privacy," the statement asserts, demanding not only a ban but also accountability for developers and distributors of the technology, and boosted efforts to protect journalists.
The statement was launched at Secret Surveillance: Countering Spyware's Threats to Freedom of the Press and Expression, an event co-hosted by advocacy organizations including Access Now.
"Invasive and abusive commercial spyware that has been used to facilitate human rights abuses globally has no place in our world," declared Access Now surveillance campaigner Rand Hammoud. "Years worth of evidence by civil society has demonstrated that the companies selling these technologies should not be rewarded with governmental contracts that would continue enabling their abuses."
\u201c#WorldPressFreedomDay\n\nJournalists can\u2019t work, media can\u2019t report accurately + freedom of expression can\u2019t flourish under constant threat of invasive surveillance.\n\n\u274c It\u2019s time for a ban on commercial spyware that has facilitated human rights abuses. \u274c \nhttps://t.co/BazjC73Cas\u201d— Access Now (@Access Now) 1683100853
Natalia Krapiva, tech legal counsel at Access Now, agreed that "this sinister technology that has been misused and abused by governments around the world is not safe in any hands, and its use can never be justified."
"Discussions do not suffice," Krapiva added. "We expect action: Protect freedom of the press, stamp out the spyware threat."
The spyware statement came as other members of the media acknowledged World Press Freedom Day in various ways, including sounding the alarm about the impacts of artificial intelligence on fact-based journalism, demanding global safeguards for digital privacy, and calling out the U.S. government for continuing to seek the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
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