Pegasus spyware
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Pegasus is phone-interception software developed in Israel. In John Kiriakou''s description its defining property is that the target does nothing: "You don''t have to take any action to activate it on your phone. You don''t have to click a link. You don''t have to respond to a text message or anything like that. It just works, just like that. And you have no idea."

Where it has surfaced

Kiriakou points to "the scandals that have already come to light in places like Greece or the United Arab Emirates, where Israeli software, Pegasus software specifically, has been used, first through an American contractor and then through the Israelis directly, where it''s being used against Americans." The Greek case he recalls as an interception of a national sports team, and he says its consequence was constitutional rather than merely criminal: "it literally brought down the Greek government."

His assessment of the present spread is deliberately unbounded: "I think it''s more sophisticated and more broadly spread than what we know right now." The comparison he draws is to signals collection inside the United States, "we wouldn''t have known that similar software programs were being used by NSA against American citizens" but for Edward Snowden, with the difference that Pegasus and its analogues are available on the commercial market. "I mean, how do you protect yourself?"

Whether anything is secure

Asked whether any messaging application was genuinely private, Kiriakou says he wanted to give an informed answer and so telephoned Tom Drake, the National Security Agency whistleblower. "He said no. The easy answer is no. Nothing''s secure." The reasoning Drake gave him concerns the moment of encryption rather than its strength: "even if it''s not true that the US intelligence community has a backdoor into Signal, Signal is only encrypted when you hit the send button. That''s when it encrypts. They can intercept your message as you''re typing it, before you hit send." Kiriakou draws the conclusion out: "it doesn''t matter if they can''t break the encryption."

Asked flatly whether privacy still exists, his answer was "there''s no such thing."

See also

- Thomas Drake
- NSA Surveillance
- Mass Surveillance
- Government encryption back-door demands
- MOSSAD
