Big Brother at Bargain

NSO Group and its rivals have made military-grade surveillance software shockingly affordable. The way it was used against the real-life hero of Hotel Rwanda might finally force lawmakers' hands

-  Peter Guest

Carine Kanimba used to dismiss her dad's warnings to watch her back as parental overprotectiveness. While she knew he had enemies back in Rwanda, she was intent on enjoying her 20s, with the nights out to prove it. Someone had broken into the family home in Brussels, but she was working a finance job in New York, where the threat felt remote. "We all would say, like, 'we get it, but we're fine," she says.

Kanimba's father had better reason than most dads to be careful. He's Paul Rusesabagina, the former manager of the Hôtel des Milles Collines in Kigali who famously sheltered hundreds of people fleeing Rwanda's 1994 genocide. Rusesabagina adopted Kanimba and her brother after their biological parents died in the pogroms with 800,000 others. The family stayed in Rwanda for a couple of years after that, until an assassination attempt drove them to seek asylum in Belgium and, later, settle in San Antonio. Starting in 2004, after Don Cheadle played him in Hotel Rwanda, Rusesabagina became, if not a household name, one of Rwanda's most famous exiles. He spoke about his experience to human-rights groups and at political confabs around the world. George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Rusesabagina also became more political. He accused Paul Kagame, the military leader-turned-technocrat who's run Rwanda since 2000, of hijacking democracy and ruling through force. He set up a party-in-exile that vowed to end Kagame's rule. This put him in the crosshairs of a regime widely suspected of violent attacks against critics around the world, and in August 2020, he became one of its victims. He boarded a GainJet charter flight in Dubai, heading, he thought, for an event in Burundi. Hours later, the flight, paid for in secret by the Rwandan government, landed in Kigali. After a show trial, Rusesabagina was sentenced to 25 years in prison for terrorism offenses.