Frontline: "Global Spyware Scandal: Exposing Pegasus, part 1: The List" (FForbidden Films, WGBH Educational Foundation, ARTE France, Mediawan Rights, aired January 3, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately I was able to switch from the movie in time to watch a Frontline special with the mouthful of a title, “Global Spyware Scandal: Exposing Pegasus, part 1: The List.” Pegasus is a secret computer program designed and coded by an Israeli international-security company called NSO Group Technologies, after the last names of the three people who started it, Niv, Shalev and Omri. It’s a piece of software that can be installed remotely on any smartphone in the world, bypassing the protections smartphone manufacturers put on their devices, and its purpose is to download all the data off that phone, including the user’s conversations, texts, photos and lists of contacts. The officials of NSO insist that they sell Pegasus only to legitimate users and only to catch criminals and terrorists, but the journalists from 17 news organitaions worldwide that came together to investigate Pegasus reached the conclusion that NSO is selling the technology willy-nilly to some of the most repressive governments in the world, who are using it not only to identify but physically eliminate dissidents. The group started with a leaked list of phone numbers Pegasus was being used to spy on, and their initial challenge was to figure out whose phone numbers they were, since a list of numbers doesn’t tell you much unless you know the actual owners’ identities.

Among the targets of Pegasus-enabled spying were Muhammad bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who used ot to coordinate the brutal assassination of Saudi-born Washington Post journalist Hamal Khashoggi; former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, who wanted to find and identify the journalists who had uncovered the scandal surrounding the ultra-luxurious home in a well-to-do part of Mexico City he couldn’t have afforded on the Mexican president’s pay; and Ihlan Aliyev,, dictator of Azerbaijan, who used it to track down and harass dissident journalists like Khadija Ismayilova,.who had been reporting on the rampant corruption in Azerbaijan and Aliyev’s personal profit from it. The show began with a comment from Paul Lewis of The Guardian, the plucky British newspaper that was one of the 17 news organizations around the world that joined forces to investigate Pegasus, who said, “I don't think it's an exaggeration to say this was something that even George Orwell in 1984 couldn't imagine.” Indeed, one thing Orwell didn’t imagine when he wrote 1984 was the power of computers and their sheer reach in the hands of an authoritarian state determined to squelch any possibility of dissent. Orwell’s “Inner Party” did it through state-sponsored terrorism, perpetual warfare and ultimately rewriting the language to make dissident ideas literally inexpressible by eliminating the words that could be used to speak or write them. He either wasn’t aware of the existence of computers (and their central role in winning World War II for the Allies by allowing them to “break” the German codes) or havve known a little of what was going on at Bletchley Park, but he didn’t anticipate how important computers would become, either to ensure freedom or to sustain repression.