On Europe 1, the journalist of the "World" Martin Untersinger returned to the investigation published by the evening daily on the espionage of French journalists by the Moroccan services via Israeli software.

The latter, Pegasus, "is able to enter Apple and Google phones, extract photos, messages, contacts, browsing history, and access the camera or microphone", details- he does.  

INTERVIEW

These revelations are already causing a scandal.

According to an investigation published Sunday in several media, including 

Le Monde,

The Guardian

and

The Washington Post

, a Moroccan security service used spyware developed by an Israeli company to target around 30 French journalists and media bosses. .

Invited Monday from Europe 1, the journalist of the

World

Martin Untersinger detailed the elements of this investigation, and told how this world espionage had been discovered. 

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"Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based organization dedicated to pursuing the work of threatened journalists, and Amnesty International have obtained a list of 50,000 phone numbers pre-selected by Pegasus clients for possible infection," Martin explains. Untersinger.

"We started from this list, we contacted as many people as possible who were on it, and we realized, by analyzing their phone, that in a large majority of cases, the software was present or had been present on their phone."

Software "diverted from its original use"

Concretely, Pegasus is "a software which is able to enter on Apple and Google phones, to extract photos, messages, contacts, and browsing history. It is able to access the camera or the micro ", specifies the journalist of

Le Monde

, describing" a very sophisticated and completely invisible spy software ".

For its part, NSO Group denied the "false" allegations published on Sunday.

Already regularly accused of playing into the hands of authoritarian regimes, the Israeli company has always ensured that its software was only used to obtain information against criminal or terrorist networks.

"Despite promises that this software is used to fight crime and terrorism, in reality it is largely diverted from its original purpose and used to spy on journalists, lawyers, members of civil society," says Martin Untersinger . 

"Flaws that no one knows"

Asked about NSO, Martin Untersinger indicates that "the economic model of this company is to provide states with the means to infect phones remotely, without intervention on the part of the victim and as invisibly as possible".

For this, he continues, "it devotes almost all of its employees to research and development, ie 2/3 of its 700 employees". 

These "look for flaws in Apple and Android phones that nobody knows, not even Apple or Google", concludes Martin Untersinger, "so that, thanks to these flaws, they can finally get the software into the phones" .