Human Rights Watch Targeted
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Lama Fakih, Crisis and Conflict director and head of Beirut office at Human Rights Watch:
On November 24 last year, I received an iMessage from Apple that left me rattled. My name is Lama Fakih and I am the Crisis and Conflict director at Human Rights Watch.
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Lama’s phones were infected at least five times using Pegasus spyware.
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What is Pegasus?
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It is a surveillance software developed by Israel-based company NSO Group.
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It can access your device’s camera and mic, and also emails, texts, address book, photos, call history, calendar entries, internet history.
Lama Fakih, Crisis and Conflict director and head of Beirut office at Human Rights Watch:
I was targeted with so-called zero-click attacks which meant I didn’t have to do anything like click on a link for the attack to begin. There’s just no way to prevent an attack like this.
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NSO Group says it only sells Pegasus to governments to stop criminals and terrorists. They said that targeting a Human Rights Watch staff member would violate company policies, and that they would examine the claim.
But researchers and human rights organizations have repeatedly shown that Pegasus has been used to target the phones of journalists and human rights defenders.
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The targeting of Human Rights Watch fits a pattern of abuse…in which governments use commercial spyware to silence critics.
Lama Fakih, Crisis and Conflict director and head of Beirut office at Human Rights Watch:
These attacks make our work harder and they make it riskier. People have been detained, they’ve been tortured and even killed after they or someone they know have been attacked with spyware.
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Apple and WhatsApp have filed lawsuits against NSO Group for targeting their users. The US has restricted trade with the company.
Lama Fakih, Crisis and Conflict director and head of Beirut office at Human Rights Watch:
But this is not enough. Governments should immediately suspend the flourishing trade in surveillance technologies until a rights-respecting regulatory framework is in place. They should stop surveillance companies from profiting off of rights abuse.
(New York, January 26, 2022) – The targeting of a Human Rights Watch staff member with Pegasus spyware underscores the urgent need to regulate the global trade in surveillance technology, Human Rights Watch said today. Governments should ban the sale, export, transfer, and use of surveillance technology until human rights safeguards are in place.
Lama Fakih, Crisis and Conflict director and head of the Beirut office at Human Rights Watch, was targeted with Pegasus spyware five times between April and August 2021. Pegasus is developed and sold by the Israel-based company NSO Group. The software is surreptitiously introduced on people’s mobile phones. Once Pegasus is on the device, the client is able to turn it into a powerful surveillance tool by gaining complete access to its camera, calls, media, microphone, email, text messages, and other functions, enabling surveillance of the person targeted and their contacts.
