- All of us live our lives on our cellphones.
We're completely connected to it.
It's just sort of an appendage at this point.
So, the ability to get into that is almost like being able
to get into your brain.
What we're really learning here is that
in country after country,
a tool that could legitimately be used for law enforcement
or for counterintelligence is being used against people
it should never be used against.
NSO is a spyware company. It's a private company.
It's an Israeli private company.
They make malicious software that governments use
to target your smartphone and gather data out of it,
and they sell this to governments all over the world.
What we have is a kind of asymmetrical warfare,
where the people who have the money
and the power politically are able to use this
against those they perceive as threats.
So, it really does impede some of the actual tools
of transparency that we rely on,
which is the ability to gather information,
the ability to spread information
without fear of being put in prison.
What NSO allows its customers to do
is to break into your devices -- usually your smartphone --
and do anything on it you can do.
They can get your location. They can get all your e-mails
and get all of your social media.
They can get all your pictures.
They can get all of your video.
They can turn on your microphone.
They can turn on your camera.
So, it provides an incredibly granular map
not just of your life and your interests
but also of your relationships.
And so, for a government spy agency, to be able to get in
to someone's smartphone is an incredibly powerful tool.
- Jamal, he was always believe we are watched.
- They're afraid of change, whether the change
coming from democracy or from revolution of any sort.
- In the case of Jamal Khashoggi,
who was the Saudi columnist
who wrote for The Washington Post
before he was murdered -- he was murdered in 2018,
when he went into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
He was kidnapped and murdered and dismembered
by a Saudi assassination team.
And we wanted to know whether Pegasus had been used
to spy on him or on people around him.
We couldn't get his phone,
but we got the phones of the two women closest to him,
and digital forensics on their phones
showed that Pegasus operators tried to infect the cellphones
of both his wife and fiancée at the time.
We know for certain that they succeeded
to penetrate one of those phones.
I think Khashoggi had a notion that he was under surveillance,
because in interviews, we were told by his wife
that he always had different apps for her to use,
that he talked with her about being under surveillance.
And so, they switched the type of communications
that went on between them.
- He started to remove some special picture from his phone,
because he used to take a lot of photo for us.
He loved selfie.
And there is one picture very special.
We don't want any human to see it.
And he used to look at it when I'm not with him.
He said, "I deleted it." I said, "Why?"
He said, "Hanan, they can hack my phone,
and I don't want them to see my wife."
- One of the most concerning things about our reporting
is that it's clear there's now what they call
"zero-click attacks."
That means a malicious actor sends something
to my iPhone, for example.
It comes to iMessage,
but it never appears on iMessage, right?
I don't see it. I don't hear it.
There's no tip-off that there's something bad happening.
And yet it can get in, and it can begin to peel back
the layers of all the security on your iPhone.
And so, you don't have to make a mistake.
Really, all of us are vulnerable.
Even people with recent devices,
even people who do the right things
and, like, keep up their passwords
and make sure that their software's updated,
this kind of technology can still get into your devices
and sort of turn your life upside down on a table,
in front of people you'll never meet.
When you think about it, it's vastly more powerful
than what we think of as sort of wiretapping.
Being able to listen in on a conversation -- great.
But being able to get all of your conversations
that you've had on your device, all of the places you've been,
the pictures you take,
the pictures you receive from other people --
that provides a very granular glimpse into your life
and your world that really is not available in any other way.
As a private company,
they're free to operate how they want to.
There are some regulations
that the Israeli government puts on them,
and the Israeli government monitors who they sell this to.
But once it's sold, the system really belongs
to the customers themselves.
And so, how they use it, whether they use it to track
someone who might be delivering a car bomb
or whether they use it to spy on their girlfriend,
there's no one really watching that,
I think is the bottom line.
When these sorts of stories have come up in the past,
NSO will never confirm who a client country is
and what the surveillance is.
But they also will say,
"We use this to fight terrorists.
We use this to fight organized crime."
And all those things may be true.
The problem is the lack of guardrails around this.
- The psychological impact of just knowing
the technology's out there is kind of bad enough.
But its real power is in the information
it gives people with bad motives and with weapons
and with the ability to not just stop you from doing your job
but to kill you and your family members.
And that's -- it just gives the state
even more power over innocent people.
- This says, "I love you." He wrote it in a message.
- Jamal was very depressed, talked about suicide,
was worried about being targeted,
while at the same time Hanan is interrogated
by the Emirati government about her relationship with Jamal.
- They told me about one WhatsApp message,
and when I send this WhatsApp message,
I did delete it immediately.
And they told me the whole message.
And this make me not comfortable how much they know.
- They put her under house arrest twice,
they threatened her family,
and they threatened her all to try to find out
what she knew about an alleged network of people that Khashoggi
was putting together that they thought was there
to overthrow the monarchy in Saudi Arabia.
- He was conscious about this,
which is make me feeling yes, I'm being watched.
And I start to talk simple with him.
He start sending me any app, free app, to talk to, like imo,
YouCall, these things.
I didn't know it before.
He taught me.
But we feel more comfortable
when I have a layover in another country, and we can speak.
- This whole spying apparatus has a chilling effect on people
who already feel like they're under threat
because they're in a minority now
in a lot of these authoritarian countries.
And then to know that their phones can be spied on
without them ever detecting it adds
to their in some cases trauma.
- Jamal didn't carry a gun.
Jamal didn't carry a bomb.
Jamal wasn't terrorist.
Jamal carry his pen and his idea,
and this is not dangerous to be killed.