Governor Spied on President Pena Nieto with Hacking Team Spyware, Lawsuit Alleges Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai - Motherboard
go to original September 10, 2017

A former intelligence officer brings to light yet more evidence of surveillance abuses in Mexico (E-Consulta)

In the last few months, human rights and internet monitoring organizations have uncovered evidence that the Mexican government uses sophisticated spyware made by an Israeli company to monitor journalists, dissidents, and even political opponents, as reported in a series of articles in The New York Times.

Now, a former Mexican spy alleges that years ago, a Mexican governor used a different sort of spyware - this one made by the infamous Italian company, Hacking Team - to surveil other government employees and politicians, including journalists and even the President of Mexico himself.

Last week, Rodolfo Raúl González Vázquez, a former agent of the Mexican intelligence agency CISEN, announced he was filing a suit against the former governor of the southern state of Puebla, Rafel Moreno Valle. González Vázquez accuses Moreno Valle of monitoring Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, plus an additional 24 others, including politicians and journalists, according to local news reports.

During a press conference, González Vázquez said this was a "clandestine espionage department," that should be considered "a criminal group."

Thanks to leaked internal documents from Hacking Team, we know Mexico was the company's largest customer. In the last few years, it appears that its competitor from Israel, NSO Group, has taken over the local market. The dissidents, journalists, and investigators targeted with spyware that have been exposed recently were all targeted with NSO's malware.

A New York Times Magazine article from January of this year detailed some of Puebla's government abuses using Hacking Team's spyware, also known as RCS or Galileo. The company has long held that it had no knowledge of how customers used its tools. But that wasn't always true. Former employees, who have left the company on ethical grounds, said they were aware of some abuses, and tried warning the company of them.

Read the rest at Motherboard

Related: Hacking Team's 'Illegal' Latin American Empire (Motherboard)

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