Paris (AFP)
Human rights organizations, media, the European Union and governments were outraged Monday over revelations of global spying on activists and journalists using Israeli-designed Pegasus software NSO Group.
Introduced in a smartphone, this software allows you to retrieve messages, photos, contacts and even listen to calls from its owner.
The investigation which reinforces the suspicions weighing long on this company, published Sunday by a consortium of 17 international media, is based on a list obtained by the network based in France Forbidden Stories ("prohibited stories") and the NGO Amnesty International, with 50,000 phone numbers selected by NSO customers since 2016 for potential surveillance.
The list includes the numbers of at least 180 journalists, 600 politicians, 85 human rights activists and 65 business leaders, according to the consortium's analysis - including the French dailies Le Monde, the British The Guardian and American The Washington Post - which has located many in Morocco, Saudi Arabia or Mexico.
"We are not talking here just of a few rogue states, but of a massive use of spyware by at least twenty countries," Amnesty General Secretary Agnès Callamard told BBC radio on Monday.
"This is a major attack on critical journalism," she said.
In question, Morocco categorically denied Monday in a statement the use by its security services to Pegasus software.
- "Shocking and serious" -
The Moroccan government denounced as "false" the information according to which the services of the kingdom "infiltrated the telephones of several national and foreign public figures and leaders of international organizations through computer software".
This affair "must be verified", reacted for her part the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, but if it is true, "it is completely unacceptable".
"Freedom of the press is a core value of the European Union," she said.
French government spokesman Gabriel Attal also denounced Monday "extremely shocking facts and, if they are true, (which) are extremely serious".
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Founded in 2011, NSO, regularly accused of playing into the game of authoritarian regimes since the alert launched in 2016 by an Emirati dissident, Ahmed Mansoor, assures that its software is only used to obtain information against criminal or terrorist networks.
The NSO group has once again "firmly denied the false accusations made" in the media consortium's investigation, according to it "full of flawed assumptions and unsubstantiated theories".
"The sources have provided information that has no factual basis," NSO wrote on its site, adding that it is considering defamation lawsuits.
- "Repression of independent journalism" -
The French news site Médiapart and the satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné announced Monday that they would file complaints in Paris, after reports indicating that the phones of several of their journalists had been spied on by a Moroccan service, in the help from Pegasus.
Médiapart said in an article on Monday that "the cell phone numbers of Lénaïg Bredoux and Edwy Plenel (co-founder of the site) are among the ten thousand that the Moroccan secret services have targeted".
According to the site, this espionage coincided with "the repression of independent journalism in Morocco", in particular against the imprisoned investigative journalist Omar Radi.
Amnesty International denounced in 2020 the hacking of Omar Radi's phone by Pegasus.
On the list dissected by the media consortium is the number of Mexican journalist Cecilio Pineda Birto, shot a few weeks after his entry on this document.
Foreign correspondents from several major media, including the Wall Street Journal, CNN, France 24, El Pais, or AFP are also part of it.
Other names of personalities appearing on the list - which notably includes a head of state and two European heads of government - will be disclosed in the coming days.
Journalists from the "Pegasus Project" met some of the holders of these numbers and recovered 67 phones which were the subject of a technical expertise in an Amnesty International laboratory.
Expertise confirmed a hack or attempted hack by NSO Group spyware for 37 devices, including 10 located in India.
- Two relatives of Khashoggi targeted -
Two of the phones belong to women close to Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, murdered in 2018 in his country's consulate in Istanbul by a commando of agents from Saudi Arabia, write the authors of the investigation.
For the other 30, the results are not convincing, often because the owners of the numbers have changed phones.
"There is a strong temporal correlation between when the numbers appeared on the list and when they were placed under surveillance," said the Washington Post.
This analysis comes in addition to a study, carried out in 2020, by the Citizen Lab of the University of Toronto (Canada), which had confirmed the presence of the Pegasus software in the phones of dozens of employees of the Qatari channel Al-Jazeera. .
WhatsApp also acknowledged in 2019 that some of its users in India had been spied on by this software.
Before NSO, other Israeli companies were suspected of supplying spyware to governments with little regard for human rights, with the green light from the Israeli Ministry of Defense.
The software "DevilsTongue" of the company Saito Tech Ltd, better known under the name of Candiru, was thus used against a hundred politicians, dissidents, journalists and activists, affirmed Thursday experts of Microsoft and Citizen Lab.
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