Shoot the Messenger: Espionage, Murder & Pegasus Spyware

Shoot the Messenger: Espionage, Murder and Pegasus Spyware continues with its eighth episode, a special interview with acclaimed journalist Carlos Dada about the intense targeting of him and his newsroom, El Faro, in El Salvador. 

El Faro is no stranger to threats and intimidation - which has increased under the administration of President Nayib Bukele.

Pegasus was used to spy on Carlos Dada for more than a 100 days in a row. Between June 2020 to November 2021, more than 20 members of El Faro were infected with NSO Group's Pegasus spyware.

John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab worked to identify the El Faro breach — this was one of the most obsessive cases of spying Citizen Lab has ever seen.

Shoot the Messenger is hosted by Rose Reid and Nando Vila and is a production of Exile Content Studio.

Guests: Carlos Dada and John Scott-Railton

Shoot the Messenger: Espionage, Murder and Pegasus Spyware continues with its seventh episode, revealing a pattern of Pegasus as a bargaining chip for foreign relations.

Over the past decade, under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - there is a direct correlation between his travels, his meet and greets with world leaders…and the proliferation of Pegasus spyware.

Shoot the Messenger is hosted by Rose Reid and Nando Vila and is a production of Exile Content Studio.

Guests: Keshet’s Amitai Ziv; Financial Times’ Mehul Srivastava; Citizen Lab’s Scott Stedman

Shoot the Messenger: Espionage, Murder and Pegasus Spyware continues with its sixth episode, breaking down the private equity funds behind the makers of Pegasus.

The NSO Group has grown from a few founders working in a renovated chicken coop to being valued at over $2 billion dollars. Where did that money come from? We dive into the complex financial web behind the NSO Group, with a structure supported by pension funds, potential clients, and power players, and how they went from being valued in the billions to being strapped for cash.

Shoot the Messenger is hosted by Rose Reid and Nando Vila and is a production of Exile Content Studio.

Guests:  Financial Times’ Kaye Wiggins; Keshet journalist Amitai Ziv; Oregon activist Sravya Tadepalli

Shoot the Messenger: Espionage, Murder and Pegasus Spyware continues with its fifth episode. As WhatsApp and Facebook bring NSO to court in the federal court, the future of the NSO Group is in jeopardy and their tactics are further exposed.

Shoot the Messenger: Espionage, Murder and Pegasus Spyware continues with its fourth episode, exposing what really happened at WhatsApp when it was breached by Pegasus in 2019.

The WhatsApp breach is a critical moment because it has put everything the NSO Group has built at risk - calling into question their valuation of $2B, making a public enemy of Silicon Valley, and initiating several major lawsuits leading all the way to the Supreme Court. In many ways, this exploit changed the trajectory of the NSO Group and its Pegasus spyware. The continuous fallout - and potential legal precedents - could affect everyone with a smartphone.

Engineers Claudiu Dan Gheorghe and Otto Ebeling take us behind the scenes of what it was like to be working at WhatsApp that fateful day where Pegasus used an exploit on the WhatsApp software. Across the globe, we'll see how the hacking of WhatsApp affected real people - like those fighting for independence in Catalonia, Spain.

Guests: Financial Times journalist Mehul Srivastava, Security Advisor Ian Amit, and former WhatsApp engineers who witnessed the Pegasus breach, Otto Ebeling and Claudiu Dan Gheorghe

Shoot the Messenger is hosted by Rose Reid and Nando Vila and is a production of Exile Content Studio.

Shoot the Messenger: Espionage, Murder and Pegasus Spyware continues with its third episode of the series digging into the origin story behind the company that makes Pegasus spyware, the NSO Group. Israeli tech entrepreneurs Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie initially developed remote access to smartphones, which evolved into Pegasus.  In a twist of fate, over the course of a decade, they have managed to beat out or outlast major competition in the spyware industry, including the Italian company Hacking Team.

Guests: Keshet cybersecurity reporter Amitai Ziv; ReaQta CEO & former Hacking Team employee Alberto Pellicione; Security Advisor Ian Iftach Amit

Shoot the Messenger is hosted by Rose Reid and Nando Vila and is a production of Exile Content Studio.

In 2018, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Turkey and was never seen again. Weeks later, the Turkish intelligence released secret tapes of Khashoggi’s last moments before being brutally murdered, causing an international uproar. It has been four years since Khashoggi’s murder, and what we now know is that the first weapon used against Khashoggi was digital and it’s called Pegasus - a kind of software that can be used to hijack your phone; a military-grade, spyware software.

Guests: Widow of Jamal Khahsoggi, Hanan Elatr; Washington Post Dana Priest; New York Times’ Carlotta Gall

Shoot the Messenger is hosted by Rose Reid and Nando Vila and is a production of Exile Content Studio.

More than four years after journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, Khashoggi’s phones are still with Turkish authorities. We learned how Khashoggi’s wife, Hanan Elatr discovered she had been targeted, tracked and spied on by Pegasus, the military-grade spyware on her phone. She was not the only one. His colleague, Omar Abdulaziz, and fellow activist, Ahmed Monsoor, were also targeted.

Guests: Citizen Lab Founder Ron Deibert; Citizen Lab Sr Fellow, Bill Marczak; New York Times’ Nicole Perlroth

Shoot the Messenger is hosted by Rose Reid and Nando Vila and is a production of Exile Content Studio.

Shoot the Messenger is a new serialized, investigative-reporting podcast where we do deep dives on the international news stories that warrant a reexamination. We start our first season asking what really happened to the murdered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi? We now know the first weapon used against him was digital - a sophisticated spyware called Pegasus. Several people in Jamal Khashoggi's inner circle have had Pegasus confirmed on their phones.

And it doesn’t stop there. There are thousands of identified targets. We all use our phones daily, as almost an extension of ourselves - but what happens when our phones are no longer safe? How did the spyware come to be, how does it work, and just how vulnerable are you?

Find out on Shoot the Messenger, in a special partnership with the Committee to Protect Journalists, our first season features ten episodes on “Espionage, Murder, and Pegasus Spyware.”

Shoot the Messenger is a production of Exile Content Studio and is hosted by Rose Reid and Nando Vila.