An Israeli firm accused of supplying spyware to governments has been linked to a list of tens of thousands of smartphone numbers, including those of activists, journalists, business executives and politicians around the world, according to reports.
The NSO Group and its Pegasus malware—capable of switching on a phone’s camera or microphone, and harvesting its data—have been in the headlines since 2016, when researchers accused it of helping spy on a dissident in the United Arab Emirates.
Sunday’s revelations—part of a collaborative investigation by The Washington Post, The Guardian, Le Monde and other media outlets—raise privacy concerns and reveal the far-reaching extent to which the private firm’s software could be misused.
The leak consists of more than 50,000 smartphone numbers believed to have been identified as connected to people of interest by NSO clients since 2016, the news organizations said, although it was unclear how many devices were actually targeted or surveilled.
NSO has denied any wrongdoing, labelling the allegations “false.”
On the list were 15,000 numbers in Mexico—among them reportedly a number linked to a murdered reporter—and 300 in India, including politicians and prominent journalists.
Last week, the Indian government—which in 2019 denied using the malware to spy on its citizens, following a lawsuit—reiterated that “allegations regarding government surveillance on specific people has no concrete basis or truth associated with it whatsoever.”
The Post said a forensic analysis of 37 of the smartphones on the list showed there had been “attempted and successful” hacks of the devices, including those of two women close to Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered in 2018 by a Saudi hit squad.
Among the numbers on the list are those of journalists for Agence France-Presse, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, El Pais, the Associated Press, Le Monde, Bloomberg, The Economist, and Reuters, The Guardian said.
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One Day Soon, You’ll Wake Up to Find Your Favorite Website Has Vanished
pjmedia.com ^ | 7/20/2021 | PAULA BOLYARD
Joe Biden’s White House is saying the quiet part out loud now. Press Secretary Jen Psaki admitted last week that, in an effort to crack down on COVID-19 “misinformation,” the Biden administration has been sending Facebook lists of topics they want to be censored.
They’re not even trying to hide it anymore. Throughout the pandemic, we’ve seen aggressive, unprecedented efforts by Big-Tech giants and their Democrat partners to silence anything that goes against the Official Narrative—whether it’s information on masking, treatments like ivermectin, the efficacy and safety of vaccines, or the election.
Our overlords in the COVID-MSM Government-Industrial Complex have used the pandemic as a weapon to bludgeon Trump and disparage his supporters. They’ve put the health of millions of Americans at risk by politicizing the pandemic and only allowing us to see information approved by politicized bureaucrats and their flacks in the left-wing media. One of the main reasons we launched our VIP subscription program a little over a year ago was so we could bypass the censors and tell the truth about topics that the social media giants and left-wing politicians have declared verboten.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com
From:
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3977714/posts
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