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Pegasus, 'The Palestine Laboratory’ and our dystopian future?
According to IndonesiaLeaks, Pegasus has been used in Indonesia since 2018, used allegedly by the National Police and the State Intelligence Agency.
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Israeli troops take position at the border with Gaza in southern Israel on Oct. 9, 2023. (AFP/Jack Guez )
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bout 20 years ago, I had a burning desire to have a Pegasus tattooed on my body, either on my arm or ankle. The reason? I loved the image of this beautiful Greek mythological white winged horse, symbolizing speed, strength, artistic inspiration and the human spirit, which transcends the physical world.
Somehow I never got around to getting inked, maybe because I didn’t quite relish the pain of the tattoo needle. But when I found out that Pegasus is the name of an Israeli made spyware used by repressive regimes to spy on their citizens, I was so relieved I didn’t get tattooed after all!
But despite that, I – and many of us – may have Pegasus embedded on ourselves in a much more sinister way: in our mobile phones that can detect and monitor our every move, and potentially, control us. Big Brother is watching you! Shades of George Orwell’s 1949 dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four!
It was the title of chapter six of the book The Palestine Laboratory. How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation around the World (Verso, 2023), that brought it home to me: “Israeli Mass Surveillance in the Brain of Your Phone”, (page 142) about the Pegasus spyware. How ironic, and what a travesty of the symbolism of its namesake mythical creature!
The Pegasus spyware was made by a company called NSO (Niv, Shalev and Omri) Group Technologies, which uses exploits – software, chunks of data, sequence of commands – that are capable of remote zero-click surveillance of smartphones.
Zero-click? Yup, “an attack that requires no user interaction to operate”, i.e. no key presses or mouse clicks. These exploits are the most sought after, as the target is unaware they have been hacked. Reportedly in 2020, the NSO group was selling zero-click exploits to governments for breaking into individuals' phones.
The Palestine Laboratory is written by Antony Loewenstein (born 1974), an Australian-German freelance investigative journalist, best-selling author and film-maker. He refers to himself as “an atheist Jew” – someone who is ethnically and to a certain extent culturally Jewish, but not religious. He has authored several other books, among others Disaster Capitalism (2015), and My Israel Question: Reframing the Israel/Palestine Conflict (2009).
