Activists and critics are at risk for NSO spyware.
Their cell phone numbers are displayed in leaked files, indicating that they were selected by the company’s dictatorial clients before being targeted by the Israeli spy firm NSO.
The record was obtained by the Forbidden Stories non-profit organization and shared with a consortium of media outlets, including the Guardian.
The list of these people is very predictable, because these tools have been sold to some of the world’s repressive regimes.
In Azerbaijan, where longtime dictator Ilham Aliyev has little opposition, many activists appear in the data. Some personal correspondence or intimate photos of the opposition have been published online or on television.
The phone numbers of six dissidents or activists in the country whose private correspondence aired on a mocking TV show in 2019 are listed in the leaked records.
Female activists are often targeted with sexual means. In a particularly egregious case in 2019, family members of civil society activist and journalist Fatima Mollamli, then 18, were exposed on a fake Facebook page.
This happened so hard for this activist that it even led him to think of suicide.
In India, data were obtained from various activists.
Omar Khalid, a student activist at the Jawahar Lal University in Delhi and leader of the Democratic Students Union, was elected in 2018 shortly before he was charged with sedition. He was arrested in September 2020 on charges of organizing a riot, and police claimed that evidence against him contained more than 1 million pages of information collected from his cell phone, without specifying how the information was obtained. He is awaiting trial in prison.
The data also included the number of cell phones of writers, lawyers and artists who advocated for the rights of indigenous and lower-class communities. Members of the network have been arrested over the past three years and charged with terrorist offenses, including plotting to assassinate Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The network included 84-year-old Jesuit priest Stan Swami, who died in prison this month after suffering from corona virus.
Records show that several people accused of complicity in Swami, including Hani Babu, Shuma Sen and Rona Wilson, have been selected for possible targeting in previous months and years of detention.
Lujin al-Hazlul, Saudi Arabia’s most prominent women’s rights activist, was selected for a possible target just weeks before she was abducted in 2018 in the UAE and was forced to return to Saudi Arabia, where she was sentenced to three years in prison. Hazlol is believed to have been selected by the UAE, a well-known NSO client and close ally of Saudi Arabia.
Despite being released from prison in February 2021, the Saudi activist is not allowed to speak to journalists or move freely in Saudi Arabia and is still under travel ban.
Hazlul had previously revealed that her emails had been hacked.
Hala al-Dosari, a US-based Saudi activist who had contacted Hatlul before his arrest in 2018, said: “My guess is that they hacked him to find out about the networks of people he connects with.”
In Mexico, some dissidents have also been targeted.
Rodney Dixon, a leading London-based lawyer who has accepted prominent human rights cases, has been selected for the 2019 target.
His clients include Matthew Hex, a British doctoral student imprisoned in the United Arab Emirates, and Hatisa Genghis, the fiancée of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Dixon said: No one should be targeted in this way. This is worrying for lawyers because it violates the basic principles of lawyer and client confidentiality, which play a key role in legal proceedings.
The phone call from Joseph Barham, a French human rights lawyer, shows that he was endangered several times in 2019, according to leaked records that he had previously been selected by Morocco to target.
The two lawyers who are suing the NSO on behalf of Omar Abdul Aziz, an exiled Saudi in Canada, are also named in the leaked information. Abdul Aziz was one of Khashuqchi’s close colleagues and friends.
India has denied the allegations, and other countries have declined to comment.