Pegasus: Heralding Global Arrival of "1984"?

[Sukla Sen]

Even the Amnesty "Toolkit" - complicated as it is, would only indicate whether a device has been infected but provide no protection per se.

Given that the malicious use of cyber weaponry has emerged as a truly global problem - even the President of France, among many others, having been hit, and being a serious human rights, and also (both personal and state) security, issue - as has already come to be revealed; it calls for an immediate global response, spearheaded by countries with stronger democratic traditions.

The Pegasus well underscores that the "1984" has truly arrived right at the doorstep of global humanity - just not limited to a very limited number of usual suspect countries, any longer.

Unless remedial measures are taken promptly enough, with many more of the kind sure to follow, it's soon going to be an unrelenting nightmare.

The immediate task is, of course, to adequately unmask and tackle the threats posed by the Pegasus and, to that end, inter alia, put its creator, and vendor, NSO and its home state Israel to rigorous scrutiny.

<<Governments, journalists, opposition politicians and rights groups worldwide are demanding a formal inquiry into Pegasus, the spyware product created by shadowy Israeli software company NSO Group. Sold to states to apparently fight terrorism and crime, the software has been discovered to have been used in unscrupulous ways to target members of the press, lawmakers and others, helping to stamp out dissent or allow governments to get ahead of potentially embarrassing scandals.

...

The spyware’s inconspicuous nature, its zero-click installation, and imperviousness to antiviruses makes it virtually impossible for phone owners to detect its presence simply by observing their device.

There’s [however] hope, as the software connects to the aforementioned C2s [i.e. command and control servers], a search to determine whether or not a phone communicated with known Pegasus installation servers can theoretically detect whether the malware is present.

...

Users can independently scan their phones for signs that their device has been compromised using Amnesty’s ‘indicator of compromise’ (IoC) toolkit. The software, formally known as the ‘Mobile Verification Toolkit’ or MVT, works with both iOS and Android, and is available for download here.

In its current form, the software is not an easy-to-use experience, has no graphical user interface, and installs on phones’ command line, meaning that basic knowledge of basic coding is needed. The toolkit also requires the download and installation of dependencies to operate.

...

Journalists, activists, politicians and others who feel vulnerable can do so [i.e. limit exposure to digital world which, in the first place, makes one vulnerable to such cyber attatacks - with no meaningful remedy] by using landlines or simple button phones with no internet capabilities for Pegasus to exploit, by engaging in face-to-face meetings instead of voice and text message conversations, using analogue or simple digital voice recorders, etc. If giving up your smartphone is not an option, there’s always the alternative of using a non-Android, non-iOS smartphone, which may be less vulnerable to the Israeli spyware by virtue of its more limited user base.>>

(Excerpted from: <https://nation.com.pk/26-Jul-2021/amnesty-international-identifies-ways-to-detect-pegasus-spyware-from-devices>.)

[Sukla Sen]

Such a profound observation and for that very reason so very deeply chilling.

<<Democracy depends on an equality of arms. If governments acquire political weapons unavailable to their opponents, they become harder to dislodge. They now possess so many that I begin to wonder how an efficient autocracy, once established, might ever again be overthrown.

The Pegasus spyware, whose widespread use by governments the Guardian has helped reveal, is just the latest variety of asymmetric force. The ability to peer into someone’s life from a distance, to track their every movement, word and intention, grants autocrats an unprecedented power. It turns us into informants against ourselves. No one subject to this spying can now plan, however peacefully and democratically, to replace a government without those plans being known in advance and in all likelihood thwarted.

Since the Berlin Wall came down, autocrats have refined a new strategy for perpetual governance: to maintain the process and appearance of democracy – including elections and parliaments – while ensuring it doesn’t work. Power is sucked out of democratic structures and relocated to a place where it can scarcely be challenged: an inner circle defended from opposition by a forcefield of money and patronage, a compliant judiciary and a grovelling media. Narendra Modi, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Jarosław Kaczyński, Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko all know how it works.[Emphasis added.]

Protest, as we have seen from Belarus to Hong Kong, often becomes ineffective. Huge numbers take to the streets, pull the lever of democratic moral authority that has toppled so many regimes in the past, and nothing happens. The autocrats sit and wait for the protest’s energy to fizzle out, crack heads and imprison leaders, knowing they no longer need fear the people. They now have the means either to win elections through rigging, suppression or beguilement, or to ignore the result if they lose. The arc of history no longer bends towards justice.

new surveillance tools complement a formidable array of modern weapons. Dark ads on social media; thinktanks using dark money to turn outrageous ideas that favour the ruling class into apparent common sense; voter suppression; the stuffing of the courts; the long march through the institutions, shutting down opposition in the civic sphere; cleverly prosecuted culture wars: these are the ever more sophisticated tools of autocratic power in nominal democracies.>>

(Excerpted from: <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/27/pegasus-spyware-autocrats-arsenal-spying>.)