Revelations shatter lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance

`Billions of people are inseparable from their phones. Their devices are within reach – and earshot – for almost every daily experience, from the most mundane to the most intimate.

- Paul Lewis

Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos, and location, activating their microphone to record them in real-time. Such are the capabilities of Pegasus, the spyware made by NSO Group, the Israeli purveyor of weapons of mass surveillance.

NSO rejects this label. It insists only carefully vetted government intelligence and law enforcement agencies can use Pegasus, and only against the phones of “legitimate criminal or terror group targets”.

Yet this week the Guardian has revealed the identities of many innocent people who have been identified as candidates for possible surveillance by NSO clients in a huge data leak.

Without forensics on their devices, we cannot know whether governments successfully targeted these people. But the presence of their names on this list indicates the lengths to which governments may go to spy on critics, rivals and opponents.

We revealed how journalists across the world were selected as potential targets by these clients prior to a possible hack using NSO surveillance tools.

Others whose phone numbers appear in the leak include lawyers, human rights defenders, religious figures, academics, business people, diplomats, senior government officials and heads of state.

Our reporting is rooted in the public interest. We believe the public should know that NSO’s technology is being abused by the governments who licence and operate its spyware.