What is Pegasus and Who’s Being Hacked?

DANA PRIEST,”THE WASHINGTON POST”: Well, there have been stories about NSO and Pegasus before, but we feel like this one is the first one to give you really the details that you haven’t seen before. Who exactly was targeted among the group that we dove deeply in? And what does it mean to their lives? So we have the examples of the two women closest to Jamal Khashoggi, the murdered Saudi columnist for “The Washington Post.” And we have indications that Pegasus tried to hack the phone of his wife before his murder, and they succeeded in hacking the phone of his fiancee just several days after the murder. So we can get have you kind of the intimate details about people’s lives, especially journalists and human rights actors around the world who were kind enough and courageous enough actually to give us their cell phones in order to analyze them. And that’s the best way we found to confirm what we saw in our records.

AMANPOUR: So what precisely did you find about the two women? For instance, it was Khashoggi’s wife and his fiancee. What did you find that was frightening, disturbing or out of the usual?

PRIEST: Well, we found that, for his wife, Hanan El-Atr, her phone was hacked — sorry — it was attempted to hack as far back as six months before his murder. The reason we couldn’t tell whether it was penetrated or not was only because she has a certain kind of phone that’s difficult to analyze for Amnesty International’s Security Lab, which is who did the forensics. But it’s clear that they tried over and over again, which could mean that they didn’t succeed at first, or it could mean that they were in there for a short amount of time. But really what that means that means, they could get her contacts. That means they could turn on the microphone. And, as she told us, sometimes — often, she had her phone in the living room when Jamal Khashoggi was there calling friends overseas. So really, these — the — breaking into the phone allows the surveiller to get a network of friends and colleagues from that phone in which they can use — what they can use to spy on other phones. So they could surround somebody like Khashoggi. We don’t know that they did. But the significance is, they could surround friends of Khashoggi, so that they get a view of what he’s doing during the day. He was very, very nimble on social media and on apps. He changed apps all the time, because he felt like he was being surveilled. On the fiancee in Turkey, what we think what that was all about, because she was not the only one that was targeted — it was also some friends of Khashoggi who were high-profile after the murder, and also Turkish intelligence officials and the prosecutor who were doing the investigation. We think that probably the Saudis, although we don’t know that it was the Saudis.