Global Spyware Scandal: Exposing Pegasus Part One

Part one of a two-part docuseries: FRONTLINE and Forbidden Films investigate Pegasus, a powerful spyware sold to governments around the world by the Israeli company NSO Group.

In 2020, the journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International gained access to a leaked list of more than 50,000 phone numbers. They suspected it contained numbers selected for potential surveillance with Pegasus. The Pegasus Project reporting consortium — which was led by Forbidden Stories and included 16 other media organizations, FRONTLINE among them — found that the spyware had been used on journalists, human rights activists, the wife and fiancée of the murdered Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi, and others.

Over two nights, this docuseries reveals the inside story of an investigation that prompted probes by governments and institutions around the world and sparked calls for an international treaty to govern the largely unregulated spyware industry.

NSO, which has disputed some of the Pegasus Project’s reporting, says that its technology was not associated in any way with Khashoggi’s murder and that it sells Pegasus to vetted governments for “the sole purpose of preventing and investigating terror and serious crime.”

Surveillance technologies like Pegasus are “a military weapon used against civilians, and the civilians, they don’t have any mechanism to help them in seeking justice,” says Laurent Richard, founder of Forbidden Stories and Forbidden Films and one of the producers of the films.

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First aired on Frontline.

Shared via Creative Commons.