How Mexico Became the Biggest User of the World’s Most Notorious Spy Tool

The Israelis had come to Mexico to clinch a serious sale: The Mexican navy was about to turn into the primary consumer ever to purchase their product, the world’s most superior spy ware.

But earlier than they might shut the deal, an argument erupted over worth and the way shortly the spy software may very well be delivered. A Mexican basic overseeing the negotiations known as for a pause till later that night, in response to two folks current and a 3rd with data of the talks.

“We’ll pick you up at your hotel and make sure to arrange a better atmosphere,” they recalled the overall saying.

That evening, a convoy of automobiles arrived on the Israeli executives’ resort and took them to a brand new spot for the fateful negotiations: a strip membership within the coronary heart of Mexico City.

The basic’s safety workforce ordered all the opposite clientele to go away the membership, the three folks mentioned, and the talks resumed.

It was in that darkish cabaret in March 2011, amongst girls dancing onstage and pictures of tequila, that probably the most highly effective cyberweapon in existence bought its begin.

The spy ware, generally known as Pegasus, has since turn into a worldwide byword for the chilling attain of state surveillance, a software utilized by governments from Europe to the Middle East to hack into hundreds of cellphones.

No place has had extra expertise with the promise and the peril of the expertise than Mexico, the nation that inaugurated its unfold across the globe.

A New York Times investigation based mostly on interviews, paperwork and forensic assessments of hacked telephones exhibits the key dealings that led Mexico to turn into Pegasus’ first consumer, and divulges that the nation grew into probably the most prolific consumer of the world’s most notorious spy ware.

Many instruments can infiltrate your digital life, however Pegasus is exceptionally potent. It can infect your telephone with none signal of intrusion and extract every part on it — each e-mail, textual content message, picture, calendar appointment — whereas monitoring every part you do with it, in actual time.

It can file each keystroke, even while you’re utilizing encrypted purposes, and watch via your telephone’s digicam or hear via its microphone, even when your telephone seems to be turned off.

It has been used to battle crime, serving to to interrupt up child-abuse rings and arrest infamous figures like Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug lord generally known as El Chapo.

But it has additionally been deployed illegally, many times, with governments utilizing Pegasus to spy on and stifle human rights defenders, democracy advocates, journalists and different residents who problem corruption and abuse.

Alarmed at how Pegasus has been used to “maliciously target” dissidents throughout the globe, the Biden administration in 2021 blacklisted NSO Group, the Israeli firm that manufactures the spy ware.

Soon after, Israel’s protection ministry — which should approve the export of Pegasus to different nations — mentioned it might ban gross sales to nations the place there was a danger of human rights violations.

Yet, regardless of ample proof of Pegasus abuses in Mexico, the Israeli authorities has not ordered an finish to its use in Mexico, in response to 4 folks with data of the contracts for the expertise.

In truth, Mexico’s navy just isn’t solely Pegasus’ longest-running consumer, the 4 folks say, but it surely has additionally focused extra cellphones with the spy ware than every other authorities company on the planet.

And the spy software continues to be deployed within the nation, not simply to fight crime.

After the revelations that Pegasus had been wielded in opposition to authorities critics tarred his predecessor, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who got here to workplace in 2018, promised to cease what he known as the “illegal” spying of the previous.

He didn’t. Previously undisclosed assessments present that, as just lately because the second half of 2022, Pegasus infiltrated the cellphones of two of the nation’s main human rights defenders, who present authorized illustration to the victims of one of the infamous mass disappearances in Mexican historical past.

The navy has a historical past of human rights abuses, and its position within the mass disappearance has been a spotlight of the investigation for years. As new allegations in opposition to the navy surfaced within the case final yr, the 2 advocates had been focused by Pegasus repeatedly, in response to forensic testing carried out by Citizen Lab, a watchdog group based mostly on the University of Toronto.

The Mexican navy is the one entity within the nation at the moment working Pegasus, the 4 folks acquainted with the contracts mentioned.

The Israeli protection ministry declined requests for remark. The Mexican protection ministry wouldn’t focus on the current hack however mentioned it adopted the federal government’s place, which asserts that intelligence gathering is “in no way aimed” at invading the non-public lifetime of political, civic and media figures.

This was the second wave of assaults on the telephone of Santiago Aguirre, one of many human rights defenders. He had been focused with Pegasus through the earlier administration, too, Citizen Lab discovered.

“This government made so many promises that things would be different,” Mr. Aguirre mentioned. “Our first reaction was to say, ‘This can’t be happening again.’”

A spokesman for the Mexican president declined to remark. In an announcement, NSO Group mentioned it “adheres to strict regulation and cannot disclose the identity of its customers.” The firm challenged the conclusiveness of Citizen Lab’s forensic analyses, whereas Citizen Lab mentioned it had no doubts about its findings.

To confirm whether or not Pegasus hacked the 2 Mexican human rights advocates in current months, NSO Group mentioned it might should be “given access to the data.” But the advocates mentioned they weren’t prepared to provide the federal government’s spying companion any extra of their non-public info.

Pegasus’ beginnings in Mexico have lengthy been shrouded in secrecy. After the evening on the strip membership, the Israeli executives of NSO Group, then a fledgling start-up, returned to Tel Aviv with the outlines of their first sale. The subsequent step was an precise contract.

So, a couple of months later, a workforce of NSO representatives returned to Mexico to point out off the spy ware to a number of the strongest folks within the nation.

On May 25, 2011, Eran Reshef, an Israeli protection trade government who helped dealer the deal, mentioned in an e-mail to NSO’s chairman and its two founders that “the demo to the Secretary of Defense and President will take place next Friday,” referring to the president on the time, Felipe Calderón, and his secretary of protection, Guillermo Galván Galván. A replica of the e-mail surfaced in an Israeli lawsuit over commissions from the sale of Pegasus to Mexico.

Two of the folks on the demonstration mentioned it had taken place on a sprawling navy base on the outskirts of Mexico City, the place the primary Pegasus machine could be put in.

Fearing leaks, the Mexican Army made the Israeli executives wait in a tiny room the place cleansing provides had been saved so nobody would see them earlier than they made their presentation. An armed soldier was stationed exterior the door.

When Mr. Calderón and Mr. Galván Galván arrived, they sat in entrance of huge screens on the wall — and watched a telephone get hacked, the attendees mentioned.

Udi Doenyas, the chief expertise officer of NSO Group who invented the Pegasus structure and led the workforce that wrote the code behind the primary model of the spy ware, confirmed that he had related the Pegasus system to a display screen and handed a BlackBerry telephone to senior Mexican officers. He requested them to make use of it.

As they did, the telephone confirmed no indicators of being compromised, however the Pegasus system methodically started extracting every bit of information, beaming it onto the display screen for all to see.

This was the spy ware’s superpower: the sneak assault.

Miguel Ángel Sosa, a spokesman for Mr. Calderón, acknowledged that the previous president had paid a go to to a navy facility, the place he was “given various presentations about the tasks” being carried out, “including the gathering of information and intelligence.”

But he mentioned Mr. Calderón was by no means knowledgeable whether or not the spy ware was ultimately bought, and that the previous president was by no means informed — “nor did he inquire” — what instruments had been used to seize criminals.

At the time, Mexico desperately wanted a method to reliably crack into BlackBerry telephones, a tool of selection for the nation’s fearsome drug cartels. From the beginning of his time period in 2006, Mr. Calderón had pushed a so-called kingpin technique for confronting organized crime, specializing in the teams’ high leaders.

Pinpointing the drug lords required expertise that allowed spies to comply with their location always. The criminals had been cautious, former regulation enforcement officers mentioned, transferring round and shutting down their telephones to keep away from being captured.

“It didn’t give you enough time to launch an operation,” mentioned Guillermo Valdés, the previous director of CISEN, which was the nation’s equal of the C.I.A., from 2007 to 2011. “If someone turned off his phone, we no longer knew where he was.”

Up to that time, Mexico had relied closely on the United States.

“The pressure on the military to raise its game in terms of intelligence capabilities was intense,” mentioned Alejandro Hope, a former intelligence officer through the Calderón administration. A possible draw of Pegasus, he mentioned, is that it might give Mexico its personal capabilities.

“They no longer wanted to be dependent on the Americans,” Mr. Hope mentioned.

The navy signed the contract to purchase the spy ware quickly after the demonstration.

In September 2011, about 30 NSO staff, a lot of the firm’s workers, flew to Mexico to arrange Pegasus, check it and instruct a workforce of about 30 Mexican troopers and officers the best way to function the expertise, in response to three folks acquainted with the set up. The Mexican unit chosen to function it was known as the Military Intelligence Center, a secretive arm of the military about which little has been made public.

Once the Mexicans had been able to run Pegasus on their very own, a brief ceremony befell that December as a approach of “handing over the keys,” two of the folks mentioned.

A doc from 2019, unearthed in an infinite hack of Mexican navy emails final yr, signifies that the Mexican intelligence heart is housed in a horseshoe-shape advanced. Three folks acquainted with it say commanders can watch via inner glass partitions as info unspools on big screens.

In a 2021 doc, additionally made public by the hack, the military says that one of many important dangers going through the middle is “that the activities carried out by this center are revealed to the public.”

Pegasus was shortly embraced by the Mexican authorities, and after Enrique Peña Nieto took workplace as president in 2012, two extra authorities companies purchased it: the legal professional basic’s workplace and CISEN, in response to Mexican officers and three folks with data of the contracts.

Within a couple of years, the spy ware started infiltrating the telephones of a few of Mexico’s most outstanding human rights attorneys, journalists and anti-corruption activists — surveillance that strayed removed from the settlement with the Israelis to focus on severe crime and terrorism.

Condemnation got here swiftly from at house and overseas, and the scandal clung to Mr. Peña Nieto for the remainder of his presidency. In all, Mexico has spent greater than $60 million on Pegasus, in response to Mexican officers, citing spending by previous administrations.

The Mexican navy has acknowledged having Pegasus solely from 2011 to 2013. But a bunch of impartial specialists investigating the disappearance of 43 college students who had been planning to attend a protest mentioned the navy had Pegasus once they had been kidnapped in 2014, and was spying on the telephones of individuals concerned within the crime on the evening the occasions unfolded.

It just isn’t clear why the navy was spying, however the intelligence was not used to assist discover the scholars, the specialists mentioned.

After Mr. López Obrador took workplace in 2018, he dissolved the federal police and changed the Mexican spy company with a brand new entity.

From 2019 via at this time, solely the navy has had Pegasus, 4 folks with data of the contracts say. And throughout that point, the spy ware has continued to be deployed in opposition to journalists, human rights defenders and an opposition politician, in response to Citizen Lab’s analyses.

Under Mexican regulation, authorities entities want a choose’s authorization to spy on non-public communications. But in public disclosures, the navy has mentioned it has not made any request to try this sort of surveillance in recent times.

On a Thursday afternoon final December, Mr. Aguirre bought an e-mail that learn like one thing out of a spy novel.

“Apple believes you are being targeted by state-sponsored attackers who are trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID,” mentioned the message, which was reviewed by The Times. “These attackers are likely targeting you individually because of who you are or what you do.”

In 2021, Apple introduced it might start sending warnings like this to customers whose cellphones had been hacked by refined spy ware. The e-mail went on to say that “sensitive data” on Mr. Aguirre’s telephone could also be compromised, “even the camera and microphone.”

Mr. Aguirre, the chief director of the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center, had been focused years earlier with Pegasus.

His abdomen sank considering of presidency spies poring over his whole digital life, from messages with torture survivors to household images along with his younger daughter.

Then it hit him: Others is perhaps compromised, too.

He ran down the corridor to the workplace of María Luisa Aguilar, the lead advocate dealing with the group’s worldwide work. She had gotten the identical e-mail.

The two advocates contacted the Mexican digital rights group generally known as R3D, which had their telephone information analyzed by Citizen Lab. It confirmed that each had been hacked a number of instances by Pegasus from June via September 2022.

“In the eyes of the armed forces, we represent a risk,” Ms. Aguilar mentioned. “They don’t want to lose the power they have accumulated.”

Natalie Kitroeff reported from Mexico City, and Ronen Bergman from Tel Aviv.