The Palestine Laboratory by Antony Loewenstein

Author:Antony Loewenstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

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Israeli Mass Surveillance in the Brain of Your Phone

Because of surveillance tech, a country can avoid massacring protestors now. Today, you’re able to identify and stop surveillance of the next Nelson Mandela before he even knows he’s Nelson Mandela.

Israeli human rights lawyer Eitay Mack

Griselda Triana is a Mexican journalist, human rights activist, and activist whose husband, Javier Valdez Cárdenas, was slain by a drug cartel on May 15, 2017, in Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa state. Valdez was the cofounder of the media outlet Riodoce, which investigated corruption and crime, and wrote about the bloody drug war. He paid the ultimate price—a grenade was thrown into his office in 2009. He had received death threats in the months before his murder, but he bravely continued his groundbreaking work despite the threats.

Ten days after his killing, Triana started receiving unexpected text messages on her mobile phone. She had no idea that they were suspicious until almost one year later, when it was discovered that there had been attempts to infiltrate her phone with the Pegasus system, a phone-hacking tool sold by Israeli surveillance company NSO Group, almost certainly by elements within the Mexican state. “Before Javier’s murder I did not know that we were being monitored,” she told me. Javier had never informed her about the possibility of phone hacking, and she presumed that he was taking precautions for his safety. “Javier knew about the risks of reporting criminal activities, but even so he was aware that someone had to document the atrocities of criminal organizations,” she said.

The murder of Valdez devastated Triana. “My reaction to Javier’s death was tremendous. He was my husband and father of my two children. I was really shocked because Javier didn’t want to leave Sinaloa even though he knew they [the cartels] could kill him.” I asked her why she thought she had been targeted by Pegasus. She said she believed it was because “they thought that by tapping the phones they could get data from various sources of information or listen to calls related to Javier’s crime investigations.” To this day, Triana has never been told by the Mexican state why it spied on her—and there’s been no court case for the man accused of masterminding her husband’s death.

Both the Mexican government and NSO claim that Pegasus is used solely for the purposes of fighting crime and terrorism, but Triana’s case proves that this claim is false. Mexico has been a major testing ground for NSO technology. “The problem is that it has been used to spy on people who do not represent a danger to the country,” Triana said.

After Valdez’s death, Triana moved to Mexico City, where she works as a journalist and activist. The fear has never gone away, however—the feeling of being violated by both her husband’s gruesome death and the state’s intrusion on her communications. “I am afraid every time I visit Culiacán,” she said. “It is something that I have not been able to overcome.”

Israel’s surveillance apparatus is a

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