Pegasus
Meta’s WhatsApp said it will ask a US court to hold NSO Group in contempt for using WhatsApp to lure targets into downloading the surveillance spyware.
Senior legal advisor Siena Anstis and senior researcher John Scott-Railton spoke with Forbes about the lagging safeguards that let spyware proliferate.
Citizen Lab senior researcher Bill Marczak served as a key witness in a UK ruling that ordered Saudi Arabia to pay £3m to a London dissident who was targeted with Pegasus spyware. In 2018, Citizen Lab researchers discovered that a Saudi operator called KINGDOM was targeting dissidents abroad with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. Saudi activist and […]
NSO Group, the firm behind Pegasus spyware, has a new executive chairman who plans to use his ties to the Trump administration to improve the company’s reputation in the U.S. Speaking with the Wall Street Journal and the Guardian, Citizen Lab senior researcher John Scott-Railton says that Pegasus creates “unbearable temptation for abuse” where “nobody […]
Citizen Lab senior researcher John Scott-Railton speaks with TechCrunch about the proliferation of spyware use, and the effects it has on democracy. While it is ostensibly used to monitor criminals, Scott-Railton says that government spyware “needs to be treated like the threat to democracy and elections that it is.” Read more in TechCrunch.
In an interview with Alex Culafi on the Dark Reading Confidential podcast, Citizen Lab director Ron Deibert speaks about changes in the digital ecosystem over the past 25 years. Deibert notes he is “heartened” by the growth of the digital rights community, but has concerns about the “golden age of surveillance” today. The lack of […]
In an interview with What Bitcoin Did, Citizen Lab senior researcher John Scott-Railton discusses the proliferation of spyware and the repercussions of its use on victims. He explains how mass surveillance “ultimately leads to self-censorship,” with significant implications for our freedom. Watch here.
In a joint investigation with Access Now, we found that seven Russian and Belarusian-speaking independent journalists and opposition activists based in Europe were targeted and/or infected with NSO Group’s Pegasus mercenary spyware.
In 2022, the Citizen Lab gained extensive forensic visibility into new NSO Group exploit activity after finding infections among members of Mexico’s civil society, including two human rights defenders from Centro PRODH, which represents victims of military abuses in Mexico.
Mexican digital rights organization R3D, with technical support from the Citizen Lab, has determined that Mexican journalists and a human rights defender were infected with Pegasus between 2019 and 2021. The infections occurred years after the first revelations of Pegasus abuses in Mexico, and after Mexico’s current President assured the public that the government no longer used the spyware, and that there would be no further abuses.
