Mexico's AG Secretly Purchased Costly Spyware Again Giovanna Salazar - Global Voices
go to original September 29, 2016

‘Big Brother is watching you‘ (Flickr/Photon)

Mexican news outlet Reforma recently confirmed that Mexico's Attorney General (the government agency in charge of investigating and pursuing federal crimes in Mexico) acquired surveillance software from the Israeli company NSO Group in 2014 and 2015 for a sum of 15 million dollars. According to Reforma:

The AG (Attorney General), under the Administration of Jesús Murillo Karam, bought the espionage software Pegasus, which is so far the most sophisticated spy software on the market and is capable of listening, viewing, and extracting text, images, and contacts from any smart phone.

This information emerges a few weeks after the North American newspaper the New York Times published an article revealing that, according to emails to which the Times had access, the Mexican government has held multimillion-dollar contracts with the NSO company in order to conduct three projects over three years since 2013.

The New York Times emphasized that in August 2016, investigators from the specialized centers on digital security issues Citizen Lab and Lookout detected attempts to tap into the cellphones of human rights advocate Ahmed Mansoor from the United Arab Emirates and of Mexican journalist Rafael Cabrera (one of the journalists behind the “Casa Blanca” investigation that involved Mexico's presidential couple in acts of corruption) with technology made by the same NSO Group. Here is what Cabrera announced on his Twitter account:

I have received these two messages, supposedly from UnoTV, from this number: (55) 6106 7277. This is not funny In Image: message on the left says, “Presidency will sue for defamation those who published the White House report.” And message on the right says, “For issue of the White House, the Presidency could incarcerate reporters while it investigates.”

The spokesman for the Mexican embassy in Washington, Ricardo Alday, responded by telling the New York Times that all intelligence systems acquired by the Mexican government have the required legal backing and that they are not being used against journalists or activists.

In spite of this, according to Mexican NGO Network in Defense of Digital Rights (R3D translation):

The revelations are worrisome, given that until now the acquisition was handled in complete obscurity; in addition, the company NSO Group has previous records of having sold its equipment to governments that do not respect human rights, as is the case with the United Arab Emirates.

Pegasus allows the extraction of images, text messages, listening to telephone calls, and stealing information from any smartphone, which makes it a highly intrusive software.

This is not the first time that the Mexican government has been seen buying surveillance technologies and using them for purposes that lie beyond public interest.

Read the rest at Global Voices

Translated by Sara Holmes

Related: How Spy Tech Firms Let Governments See Everything on a Smartphone (The New York Times)

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