Imagine a state-sponsored surveillance app secretly monitoring everything on your phone; recording it all for some shady intelligence agency so they can direct assassins to come cut you to ribbons and carry you away in a suitcase.

Now, imagine that's not fiction.

It is in fact, exactly what happened to Saudi-born Washington Post Journalist, Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, when he was brutally murdered inside a Turkish  embassy by agents of the Saudi government, who tracked him by using a spyware app called Pegasus secretly implanted on his fiance's phone.

But that software didn't just wind up there willy-nilly. It was put there on purpose, by the Saudi government, who bought it from an Israeli company called The NSO Group.

But Khashoggi was far from its only target.

Just one year after his death, in 2019, Pegasus was deployed to hack the accounts of at least 1,400 WhatsApp messaging platform users, which when discovered by WhatsApp's parent company, Meta; they filed a massive lawsuit against the NSO Group.

Now, Meta is hailing a recent federal court decision in that lawsuit awarding them $167.8 million dollars in damages from the NSO Group as "the first victory against illegal spyware that threatens the safety and privacy of everyone."

In a statement posted on their website, they explain:

"NSO’s Pegasus works to covertly compromise people’s phones with spyware capable of hoovering up information from any app installed on the device. Think anything from financial and location information to emails and text messages, or as NSO conceded: “every kind of user data on the phone.” It can even remotely activate the phone’s mic and camera – all without people’s knowledge, let alone authorization."

The Human Rights organization, Amnesty International also applauded the court decision, calling it "a momentous win in the fight against spyware abuse", and noting that Pegasus software has been "implicated in severe human rights violations against civil society, including journalists and activists, globally."

With that in mind, I had a fascinating conversation about the widespread use of spyware, and why governments–including our own– use it, with Dr. Karl Kaltenthaler, who Directs the University of Akron's Michael J. Morell Center for Intelligence and Security Studies.

Listen now.

Dr. Karl Kaltenthaler, University of Akron

Biography

Karl Kaltenthaler’s research and teaching focuses on security policy, political violence, political psychology, public opinion and political behavior, terrorism, counterterrorism, and xenophobia. He has been part of or completed multiple research studies in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Syria, Tajikistan, and the United States. He is currently researching the radicalization process and recruitment into violent political extremism as well as ways to counter this process (Countering Violent Extremism). This work has resulted in academic publications and presentations as well as reports and briefings for the U.S. government. His research has been published in three books, multiple book chapters, as well as articles in International Studies Quarterly, Political Science Quarterly, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, as well as other journals.