Dozens of women across India, the Middle East and North Africa who were likely targeted for surveillance by governments using Pegasus spyware are now at a heightened risk of being blackmailed or harassed, tech experts and victims said.
Developed by Israeli tech firm NSO, Pegasus turns a mobile phone into a surveillance device — using its microphone and cameras and accessing and exporting messages, photos and e-mails without the user’s knowledge.
Deploying the software in countries with few privacy protections, restricted freedom of expression and broadly conservative societies can pose a particular risk to women, rights activists warned.
Photo: AFP
“A woman being targeted for surveillance is different from a man being targeted because any information can always be used to blackmail or discredit her,” said Anushka Jain at the Internet Freedom Foundation in Delhi, that is providing legal assistance to two activists — including a woman — who were targeted.
“Women already face harassment online. If they think they can be surveilled, they may self censor even more and will simply be afraid to speak up,” said Jain, an associate counsel.
A leaked database of 50,000 phone numbers that were possibly compromised between 2017-2019 included dozens of numbers of women — 60 of them from India, among them journalists, activists and homemakers, according to Indian news portal The Wire.
One potential target was a former Supreme Court employee who accused then-chief justice Ranjan Gogoi of sexual harassment, although judges later dismissed the complaint. Several members of her family were also on the list.
“She was not a public persona, so she was being surveilled for no other reason than that [complaint],” Jain said of the woman, whose identity has not been publicly disclosed.
“It’s a massive invasion of her privacy,” Jain said.
Indian authorities have declined to say whether the government had purchased Pegasus spyware for surveillance, only saying that “unauthorized surveillance does not occur.”
In an e-mailed statement, an NSO spokesperson said that it undertakes “vigorous pre-sale human rights and legal compliance checks to minimize the potential for misuse” and has cut access to clients who have been found to be abusing the technology.
The spokesperson declined to say whether any of those shutdowns were linked to the use of material gathered through Pegasus to blackmail or otherwise intimidate women.
‘PAWNS TO SETTLE SCORES’
In India and beyond, some women were suspected to have been targeted not because of their activities, but because they were linked to other potential targets.
Abha Singh, a lawyer and former bureaucrat in Mumbai, said the news that she was a potential target came as a “huge shock.”
Her brother, a senior law enforcement officer, was also on the list, according to The Wire.
“Women have become pawns to settle scores, and are being implicated for nothing other than who they are connected to,” said Singh.
“But I will not be silenced; I will carry on with my work,” said Singh, who works on issues including gender justice and freedom of expression.
A similar trend emerged in the Middle East and North Africa, said Alia Ibrahim, co-founder of Daraj, the regional media outlet that partnered with Amnesty on the Pegasus Project.
She estimated a third of the potential targets in the region were women — including rights defenders and journalists, but also women linked to powerful men or men who were themselves targeted.
“That’s the justification — that they’re a mother, wife, daughter,” Ibrahim said.
The most high-profile targets were arguably Princess Latifa, daughter of UAE Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashid al-Maktoum, and Princess Haya Bint al-Hussein, her stepmother and the Prime Minister’s former wife.
The possibility that their phones — and those of two female friends of Latifa’s — were surveilled has been linked to the foiling of the younger princess’s attempt to escape the UAE in 2018.
Hatice Cengiz, the fiancee of murdered Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi, and his wife Hanan al-Atar were also identified as possible targets.
Among the nearly 10,000 leaked phone numbers tied to Morocco, were Salma Bennani — the wife of the king, himself identified as a potential target — and Claude Mangin, the French wife of Sahrawi activist Naama Asfari, who has been imprisoned in Morocco since 2010.
That had created a broader malaise among women in the region who never considered they could be the target of such sweeping surveillance, said Ibrahim.
“You become paranoid or scared that you’re constantly being watched because of the people that you know,” she added.
‘BODILY VIOLENCE’
Even if researchers could confirm a device was compromised, they could not identify what material may have been collected — raising concerns that private conversations or revealing photographs may have been swept up.
Mobile phones contain information that is “deeply personal and intimate,” so a hack has greater impacts for women, said Vrinda Bhandari, a lawyer who works on digital rights and privacy issues in India.
“When their phone is hacked, women experience this not just as a privacy violation, but also as a violation of their bodily integrity — akin to bodily violence,” she said.
Such pressures are familiar to Moroccan journalist Hajar Raissouni, who was sentenced in 2019 to a year in prison on charges of having premarital sex and an abortion, which is illegal in Morocco unless the pregnancy threatens the mother’s life.
Raissouni said her number and that of her husband had been listed as possible Pegasus targets.
“Your whole phone is at the program’s mercy — so my whole life was open to these people,” she said.
That had made her much more paranoid — constantly deleting pictures of herself from her phone, using codes to communicate with loved ones, and leaving her devices in a separate room during private conservations, she said.
“Our chats with our relatives our friends, photos of our bodies — if they leak that, given how fast this material spreads on the Internet — they can use that against us.”
In 2020, a labor attache from the Philippines in Taipei sent a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs demanding that a Filipina worker accused of “cyber-libel” against then-president Rodrigo Duterte be deported. A press release from the Philippines office from the attache accused the woman of “using several social media accounts” to “discredit and malign the President and destabilize the government.” The attache also claimed that the woman had broken Taiwan’s laws. The government responded that she had broken no laws, and that all foreign workers were treated the same as Taiwan citizens and that “their rights are protected,
A white horse stark against a black beach. A family pushes a car through floodwaters in Chiayi County. People play on a beach in Pingtung County, as a nuclear power plant looms in the background. These are just some of the powerful images on display as part of Shen Chao-liang’s (沈昭良) Drifting (Overture) exhibition, currently on display at AKI Gallery in Taipei. For the first time in Shen’s decorated career, his photography seeks to speak to broader, multi-layered issues within the fabric of Taiwanese society. The photographs look towards history, national identity, ecological changes and more to create a collection of images
A series of dramatic news items dropped last month that shed light on Chinese Communist Party (CCP) attitudes towards three candidates for last year’s presidential election: Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) founder Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), Terry Gou (郭台銘), founder of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), and New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). It also revealed deep blue support for Ko and Gou from inside the KMT, how they interacted with the CCP and alleged election interference involving NT$100 million (US$3.05 million) or more raised by the
March 16 to March 22 In just a year, Liu Ching-hsiang (劉清香) went from Taiwanese opera performer to arguably Taiwan’s first pop superstar, pumping out hits that captivated the Japanese colony under the moniker Chun-chun (純純). Last week’s Taiwan in Time explored how the Hoklo (commonly known as Taiwanese) theme song for the Chinese silent movie The Peach Girl (桃花泣血記) unexpectedly became the first smash hit after the film’s Taipei premiere in March 1932, in part due to aggressive promotion on the streets. Seeing an opportunity, Columbia Records’ (affiliated with the US entity) Taiwan director Shojiro Kashino asked Liu, who had
RSS