Project Pegasus revelations
 | |
| Date | 18 July 2021 |
|---|---|
| Perpetrators | Pegasus Spyware, Israel? |
| Description | Mass leak of info about Israel spyware |
The Project Pegasus revelations emerged on 18 July 2021 in corporate media, and showed how various governments used Israeli spyware to spy on corporate journalists, opposition politicians, activists, business people and others. The official narrative has several problems. The story has all the hallmarks of a bone thrown to obedient journalists as a reward.
The most noticeable thing with the revelation is that this is not new information. The independent media journalist Whitney Webb analyzed it extensively in 2017, and even corporate media outlets was writing about it the same year, in connection to the Jamal Khashoggi case.
The 'revelations' serves several purposes. They present corporate journalists, politicians like Emmanuel Macron and deep-state funded NGOs as noble champions so dangerous that they are "targeted" by the spooks.
It also is meant to create trust in the outlets reporting the story, to create an impression that they actually do independent investigative reporting.
Official narrative
In 2020, a list of over 50,000 phone numbers believed to belong to individuals identified as "people of interest" by clients of the Israeli cyberarms firm NSO Group was leaked to Amnesty International and Forbidden Stories, a media nonprofit organisation based in Paris, France. This information was passed along to 17 corporate media organisations under the umbrella name "The Pegasus Project". Over several months, over 80 journalists from The Guardian (United Kingdom), Le Monde and Radio France (France), Die Zeit, Süddeutsche Zeitung, WDR and NDR (Germany), The Washington Post and Frontline (United States),[1] Haaretz (Israel), Aristegui Noticias and Proceso (Mexico), Knack and Le Soir (Belgium), The Wire (India), Daraj (allegedly from Syria but sponsored by the Open Society Foundations[2]),[3] and OCCRP investigated the spying abuses.
Forbidden Stories is sponsored by the usual suspected corporate/deep state/intelligence cutouts, like Open Society Foundations and Luminate.
Leaders spied on
Heads of State affected include Imran Khan, Ruhakana Rugunda, Emmanuel Macron and Cyril Ramaphosa.[4]
Countries
