Tense and compelling, Pegasus reveals how thousands of lives have been turned upside down by this unprecedented threat, and exposes the chilling new ways governments and corporations are laying waste to human rights – and silencing innocent citizens.
This is the gripping true story of how the Pegasus scandal was uncovered, written by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud, the two intrepid reporters at the heart of the discovery. Working in collaboration with an international consortium of journalists, their findings shook the world.
Pegasus is widely regarded as the most powerful cyber-surveillance system on the market – available to any government that can afford its multimillion-dollar price tag. The system’s creator, the NSO group, a private corporation headquartered in Israel, boasts about its ability to thwart terrorists and criminals.
But the Pegasus system doesn’t only catch terrorists and criminals.
Pegasus has been used by repressive regimes to spy on thousands of innocent people around the world: heads of state, diplomats, human rights defenders, lawyers, political opponents, and journalists.
Virtually undetectable, the system can track a person’s daily movement in real time, gain control of the device’s microphones and cameras at will, and capture all videos, photos, emails, texts, and passwords – encrypted or not. Its full reach is not even known.
Laurent Richard is the founder and director of Forbidden Stories, a consortium of journalists that was awarded the 2019 European Press Prize and the 2021 George Polk award for its work continuing the investigations of threatened reporters.
Sandrine Rigaud is an award-winning investigative journalist, and the editor-in-chief of Forbidden Stories.
