Monitoring: Pegasus must be prohibited

The revelations of Edward Snowden had highlighted the magnitude of mass surveillance operated by the United States and their closest allies.The new information published by the Forbidden Stories consortium on the Israeli company NSO show the extent of total targeted surveillance.In the hands of authoritarian powers, this advanced technology is used to spy on, and, ultimately, to dismiss those who embarrass: opponents of course, lawyers, journalists, in short, civil society.These technologies must be prohibited.

Do they meet a legitimate need?In many states, security services can listen to conversations, geolocate phones, get fadettes [detailed invoices, editor's note] to find out communication habits, reconstruct a navigation history on the Internet, and even hack a device.Pegasus allows all this and much more.It transforms our smartphones into formidable indicic.Practically undetectable, contamination is done remotely, without requiring any action on the part of the target.Then, the clients know everything: the microphone and the camera can be triggered remotely, all the data (photos, contacts, agenda, etc.) are sucked, encryption (encryption) of messaging as a signal, Whatsapp or Telegram ismade by.The eye is placed on the shoulder of the victim who suspects nothing.

This total surveillance permitted by a single tool can not have a good community, it carries in it the arbitrariness of the one who is only changed by the desire to accumulate information, if possible compromising-and they will probably end up with the'Be -, and not by the need to conduct a police investigation for specific, opposable and questionable facts one day before a court.The technology creates the drunkenness of surveillance, this infamous feeling from which the inhabitants of RDA, Albania of Hoxha, Libya of Gaddafi, of the Soviet Union, etc. have suffered too much..

Espionage: Pegasus, Crime Mobiles

Anti-surveillance: Extensions of the field of struggle

These surveillance weapons are not lethal, will we object?You have to look at twice.The Digital Violence Platform ("digital violence"), designed by Amnesty International, shows the links that exist between surveillance and repression.Admittedly, Pegasus does not attack his targets physically, but language gives us an idea of the violence that falls on the victims: we do not kill a private life, we violate it.The verb says the severity of desecration.

Is a ban illusory?Because, after all, who can control a few lines of code?NSO technology is not so easy to develop, hence the important market share that has been cut by the Israeli start-up (which is not the only one to work in this niche sector).But above all, humanity has succeeded in agreeing to prohibit weapons whose effects have been rightly deemed exorbitant by their indiscriminate nature or their atrocious consequences, when they do not all rest on techniques of an extraordinarycomplexity.We think of anti -personnel mines or certain chemical weapons, dirty weapons.Their use has not completely disappeared despite the prohibition treaties, claim those who oppose regulation.The number of civilian victims of anti -personnel mines has been divided by ten in fifteen years, going from 30,000 to 3,000 per year.Not really a detail.The prohibition of employment and commerce forced to use clandestine supply networks and thus literally increases the cost of purchase, and symbolically of use.International regulation works when political will exists.

We must ban these new weapons now because we are only at the dawn of our digitized lives.

Global hack: How does Pegasus software work?