Spyware Reportedly Used to Track Mexican Activists Nicole Perlroth - The New York Times
go to original February 12, 2017

Dr. Simón Barquera, the director of nutrition policy at Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health, received disturbing text messages, as did others who were vocal proponents of Mexico’s 2014 soda tax (Adriana Zehbrauskas/The New York Times)

Last summer, Dr. Simón Barquera’s phone started buzzing with a series of disturbing text messages from unknown numbers. One said his daughter had been in a serious accident. Another claimed to be from a friend whose father had died — with a link to funeral details.

Yet another message informed Dr. Barquera, the director of nutrition policy at Mexico’s National Institute of Public Health, that a Mexican news outlet had accused him of negligence, again with a link. And in more menacing messages, someone claimed to be sleeping with Dr. Barquera’s wife. That included a link to what the sender claimed was photo evidence of their affair.



That same week, Luis Manuel Encarnación, then the director at Fundación Mídete, a foundation in Mexico City that battles obesity, also started receiving strange messages with links. When he clicked, Mr. Encarnación was ominously redirected to Gayosso, Mexico’s largest funeral service.

The messages Mr. Encarnación received were identical to a series of texts sent to Alejandro Calvillo, a mild-mannered activist and founder of El Poder del Consumidor, yet another Mexico City organization that has been at the forefront of battling childhood obesity in the country.

What the men had in common was this: All were vocal proponents of Mexico’s 2014 soda tax, the first national soda tax of its kind. It is aimed at reducing consumption of sugary drinks in Mexico, where weight-related diseases kill more people every year than violent crime.

The links sent to the men were laced with an invasive form of spyware developed by NSO Group, an Israeli cyberarms dealer that sells its digital spy tools exclusively to governments and that has contracts with multiple agencies inside Mexico, according to company emails leaked to The New York Times last year.

NSO Group and the dozens of other commercial spyware outfits that have cropped up around the globe over the past decade operate in a largely unregulated market. Spyware makers like NSO Group, Hacking Team in Italy and Gamma Group in Britain insist they sell tools only to governments for criminal and terrorism investigations.

But it is left to government agents to decide whom they will and will not hack with spying tools that can trace a target’s every phone call, text message, email, keystroke, location, sound and sight.

The discovery of NSO’s spyware on the phones of Mexican nutrition policy makers, activists and even government employees, like Dr. Barquera, raises new questions about whether NSO’s tools are being used to advance the soda industry’s commercial interests in Mexico.

Read the rest at The New York Times

Related: Cyber Attacks on International Banks Show Links to Hackers Who Hit Sony (The Wall Street Journal)

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