Dear OCCRP Reader,

Yesterday, OCCRP published a groundbreaking investigation that found that military-grade spyware licensed by the Israeli technology firm NSO Group has been used to hack the smartphones of dozens of journalists and activists worldwide. 

Pegasus can secretly steal personal data, read conversations, and switch on microphones and cameras — no clicking is needed from the target. 

Led by Forbidden Stories with tech support from Amnesty International’s Security Lab, The Pegasus Project is an international collaboration of more than 80 journalists from 17 media organizations. Journalists from OCCRP have been working on the project for months.

NSO Group says Pegasus is meant only to help fight crime and terrorism, and claims to hold its government clients to that requirement. Our reporting explodes that narrative.

Four of the journalists in our network — András Szabó and Szabolcs Panyi from our Hungarian member center Direkt36, and Azerbaijani journalists Khadija Ismayilova and Sevinj Vaqifqizi, all of whom have reported on corruption at the highest levels of government — were on a list of 50,000 names allegedly selected for targeting. 

While the Pegasus Project exposes clear cases of misuse of NSO Group’s software, the company is just one player in a global, multi-billion-dollar spyware industry. For-profit spyware companies have "democratized" access to cutting-edge technology, enabling repressive governments to surveil and track journalists and activists. With little regulation and oversight, surveillance technology presents one of the biggest threats to democracy and freedom of expression in the world today.

We’ll be publishing more stories throughout this week and next on this important investigation. 

And we’ll keep digging.