Pegasus can do things on your phone
that you can’t even do.
It can activate any function on your phone.
It completely mirrors it.
Amnesty International reports a massive leak of 50,000 phone numbers.
I think what the project is showing
is the breadth and the scale of the abuse.
At the center of the probe is the Pegasus spyware.
It can look through your cameras.
It can also take pictures.
It accesses your messages, your history.
It can listen to what you say and can also record you.
So, yeah, Pegasus is pretty terrifying.
So what is Pegasus?
It’s a software created by an Israeli company called NSO Group,
and the company says it’s designed to track terrorists.
Jamal Khashoggi,
a Saudi journalist,
was murdered.
Several of the people that he was in touch with
were surveyed by Pegasus.
That should stop everyone and make us think.
Cyber weapons are weapons.
People get killed.
[INVESTIGATORS]
My name is Eyal Weizman.
I am the director of Forensic Architecture
and also a professor at Goldsmiths.
I’m Shourideh Molavi.
I’m the lead Israel-Palestine researcher at Forensic Architecture.
People think of architecture
as simply the kind of the design of objects and spaces.
But architecture is a very useful tool
in actually mapping human rights violations
that are caught on camera.
We use spatial and media methodologies and technologies
to investigate state and corporate violence.
We investigate police forces. We investigate the military.
We investigate sometimes secret services.
Architects and artists, scholars, researchers, designers, developers
working together on a single investigation.
We worked very often on the Israeli colonial violence in Palestine.
Until now, that has mainly involved things like checkpoints, roadblocks,
military and police violence against Palestinians.
Today, contemporary colonialism is also digital.
You need to control people.
And this is where the NSO Group comes in.
The NSO Group is an Israeli cyber-surveillance company.
It has emerged in the context of a whole ecosystem
that emerged out of Israeli state surveillance of Palestinians.
The problem with Pegasus is that we don’t know a lot of information.
What we know is that
the hack will either come in the form of a one-click hack,
which means that you get a message on your phone,
you click on that message, and then your phone is hacked.
Or it comes in the form of a zero-click.
And this is where the missed call on your phone
is able to hack your phone.
Later version of Pegasus,
they just send you a message, and the message carries the malware.
This is called the WhatsApp hack.
The NSO found a vulnerability within WhatsApp
and used software too, actually, as a doorway into people’s phones.
Pegasus is sort of setting the stage
for the new terrain of warfare against activists
and civil society groups around the world.
Pegasus was on our radar for three or years.
We first heard about Pegasus when we were invited to investigate
the 2014 disappearance of the students of Ayotzinapa.
They’ve entered the town of Iguala
and disappeared there.
The 43 teaching students disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero,
on September 26, 2014
when they were kidnapped by municipal police officers
who handed them over to an organized crime group.
There is much evidence that authorities
at all levels of government obstructed justice.
We collected an enormous amount of information
about that act of disappearance:
videos, photographs, phone calls, CCTV camera footage.
There’s evidence, according to our investigation,
that there was state collusion and state involvement
in that disappearance.
That was an extremely controversial case in Mexico,
exposing a huge level of state complicity.
When reporters like Carmen Aristegui begin to report on it,
or lawyers like Centro Prodh
try to hold the state accountable in petition,
they become targets of the state.
And it’s exactly these people who were targeted by Pegasus.
We understood that the state is very interested in our investigation,
that it felt threatened by what we were discovering.
We knew personally many of the people that were on that list,
and we understood that we needed to act.
Our friends and our collaborators were targeted by Pegasus,
so naturally, we started to use our own skill sets.
And what we could do was actually use this sort of open-source ethos
of Forensic Architecture.
So open-source investigation is
looking at everything that’s in the public domain—
everything that is posted,
everything that is mentioned that is accessible to us publicly.
Each story and each target of NSO was reported on in isolation.
We started to look at every report and article,
account of hacking that we could find.
So by collecting information from India and Rwanda,
from Palestine and from Mexico,
putting them together.
In a platform,
a 3D interactive space that allows you to see physical violence,
digital violence,
corporate transactions,
exposures of hacks, and contextual events.
Our ethos of open-source investigation
allows us to gain another insight.
NSO has gone on a PR campaign
to talk about why Pegasus is significant,
why it’s important for governments to have access to Pegasus,
and a large part of the discussion is anti-terror.
Now, what we have found in this process
that the people that were most interesting
for those repressive regimes
were actually investigators.
These are journalists, activists, opposition figures,
religious figures, dissenters, people living in exile,
community organizers.
Far from what anyone would imagine a so-called terrorist to be.
Knowing that you are targeted
extract a huge psychological toll on you.
Perhaps do not want to speak to people
because you don’t want to compromise them,
so you stop communicating.
Pegasus cuts the network of practice that confronts state crimes.
I’ve spent the past year and a half
talking to over a dozen targets of Pegasus.
So these are people who had experiences with arrests
and imprisonment.
And yet, when they were describing their experience of hacking,
some were close to tears.
They were talking about nightmares, psychological distress,
emotional distress.
Our project is really a way to push back at this,
this attempt by states to cut those networks.
I think people connect to this story intuitively
because everyone now has a smartphone.
And when your smartphone becomes a surveillance device,
people are terrified, and they’re justifiably terrified.
It’s terrifying some of the strongest people in the world.
Pegasus is so advanced
that it’s very difficult to capture all of the instances of hacking.
Now, we collected this information
knowing that it’s only a fraction of what the actual hacks are.
With this limited data set,
we’re still able to determine patterns and relations
of how digital violence works.
And in determining patterns and relations,
you’re also able to tell a story.
That, of course, the terrain of warfare in Mexico is very different
than the terrain of warfare in Saudi Arabia.
But when you place them alongside each other,
you realize that physical and digital operate in very similar ways
in both of these spaces.
When we launched that project,
we had people from all over the world speak about their experience,
Mexicans with Rwandans, Palestinians with Emiratis.
People from all over the world actually joined
by being targeted by this malware.
And happily,
I mean, if there’s one thing that I’m walking away from with this project
is that it is a failed project on behalf of the state.
People are not silencing.
If anything, they are becoming more empowered, more organized, angrier.
Standing up and saying, “We continue our work,
we continue resisting,
we will call our states to account,
and we’re not afraid.”
We are creating networks
to push back against all of that silencing and cutting
that software like Pegasus does.