Investigators Into Missing Ayotzinapa Student Teachers Were Attacked with Government Spyware Cory Doctorow - Boing Boing
go to original July 10, 2017

In 2014, 43 students from Mexico's Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers' College went missing in Iguala, in the state of Guerrero: they had been detained by police, who turned them over to a criminal militia, who are presumed to have murdered them.

Today, Citizen Lab has revealed that the independent investigators into the mass disappearance were targeted for surveillance by Pegasus spyware, made by the US-Israeli NSO group and exclusively sold to governments.

NSO claims that it carefully vets the clients it sells its cyberweapons to, but the evidence from Mexico shows that at least some of their customers use NSO products to preserve corrupt political arrangements. Earlier Citizen Lab reports demonstrated that NSO's Mexican government customers had targeted anti-corruption journalists and lawyers (going so far as to target the child of a journalist, while that child was in the USA); the same tactics were used against activist who agitated for curbs on the marketing of sugary drinks.

But those forms of corruption are abstract and dry, while the Iguala disappearances shocked the conscience of the nation and the world. It resulted in the formation of the Interdisciplinary Group of Independent Experts (GIEI), convened by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), with investigators from Colombia, Chile, Guatemala and Spain.

GIEI says its investigations were hampered throughout the process, but the Pegasus attacks came at the very end, just before they were to release their report.

Pegasus is the NSO Group's flagship product. The NSO Group is a self-described "cyber-warfare" company based in Israel, whose primary investor is the United States based private equity firm Francisco Partners, who are reportedly planning to sell NSO for $1 billion, a move that would coincide with NSO's re-branding as Q Cyber Technologies, which would make it harder for casual searchers to link evidence of NSO's complicity in crimes against humanity with the company.

Read the rest at Boing Boing

Related: Reckless III: Investigation Into Mexican Mass Disappearance Targeted with NSO Spyware (Citizen Lab)

Related: Spyware to Tap Into Smartphones Puts Users’ Rights at Risk (VOA News)

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