Spyware Scandal: Years of Questions, No Answers for Mexico Victims Avi Asher-Schapiro and Christine Murray - Thomson Reuters Foundation
go to original August 22, 2022

A decade after Mexico became a testbed for the global spy tool now known as Pegasus, prosecutors still cannot say who ordered the mass surveillance of innocent civilians and government critics, people familiar with the investigation said.

What is more, the office leading the probe was one of the entities that first bought the military-grade Israeli spyware, whose global reach - enabling the remote surveillance of smartphones - has raised fears of unprecedented snooping on civilians.

Mexico alone spent more than $160 million on Pegasus over a decade, the government says, giving ministries the power to spy on ordinary people and opponents of the then-government alike.

“Again and again these tools are being abused

everywhere,” said Luis Fernando Garcia, executive director of digital rights nonprofit R3D.

“This is not a few bad apples or a few bad public officials.”

There have been no arrests or announcements of sackings over the Mexican revelations, despite forensic evidence showing the software had been widely used to target government critics. Pegasus software, developed by Israeli company NSO Group, was used globally to try to hack the phones of journalists, activists and government officials, found an investigation published last month by a group of 17 international media organisations and Amnesty International.

But Mexico had a four-year headstart to probe the explosive allegations: years that critics say were - at best - squandered.

Authorities frittered away time, they said, checking to see if any of Mexico’s 2,000 municipalities had bought Pegasus, even as documents showed the big buyer was likely central government.

They also ran into a number of roadblocks, such as a lack of cooperation from Israeli authorities, according to documents and people familiar with the investigation.

“In four years, the investigation has not produced any type of meaningful results,” said Garcia, whose work led to the Pegasus investigation that began in Mexico in 2016.

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