The warning came in August 2020. I was instructed to meet him at six o'clock at night in a deserted parking lot in San Salvador by a reliable source. He had my number but didn't want to leave a trail, so he reached me through a friend instead. He instructed me to leave my phone in the car when I got there, stated Nelson Rauda Zablah, a Salvadoran journalist whose work has been featured in the New York Times, the BBC, the Los Angeles Times, and the Economist among other publications.
Moreover, he informed me as we walked that the negotiations between the president of El Salvador and the renowned MS-13 gang were the reason my colleagues at the Salvadoran news outlet El Faro were being watched.
Although this may seem like a terrifying movie scene, several journalists from Central America have actually experienced it. Many people in my profession go about their daily lives with the sense that they are being watched, putting their phones away before meetings, utilizing encrypted messaging and email apps, communicating in code, and never sharing their real-time location.
I wouldn't understand what my source meant in full until more than a year later. Not only were my colleagues being followed as they looked into that story. They had frequently been the targets of Pegasus, a type of weapons-grade espionage software, along with at least 18 other El Faro members, including myself. The shiny new toy of the Israeli spyware company NSO Group is called Pegasus. The Citizen Lab and other forensic analysis firms discovered that the Pegasus attacks in El Salvador began in June 2020 and persisted through November 2021. This technique was used to spy on 35 journalists and members of civil society in total.
When you have the Pegasus virus, spies essentially have a duplicate of your phone. They have access to everything, including your private photos, texts, transactions, and app choices and usage. I had to take action when the surveillance was detected, which included closing my family group chat and uninstalling my financial apps.
For journalists, this implies that spies can listen in on all of our phone calls and chats with sources. I was attacked while pursuing and publishing personal footage of President Nayib Bukele's siblings discussing the Bitcoin Law in El Salvador with foreign businessmen before it went into law. As my colleagues Carlos Martnez and Gabriela Cáceres continued to divulge additional information concerning the government's interactions with gangs and a related criminal investigation, they were hacked. I could continue forever.
After the assaults, journalism has become much more challenging. Several sources jokingly returned our calls after the hacking was made public by wishing any decent people listening to a good day. However, a lot more people only picked up the phone to tell us to stop calling, and the majority of them didn't even answer. One person told me that he now knew why his wife had been let go from her government job, according to a source. I was miserable. Guilty. Powerless.
Above all else, Pegasus makes you feel helpless. We think the infections in El Faro occurred as a result of a "zero-click exploit," which means we didn't even click on a fake link to let the spies in. Just now, they got in. Get a new phone, and change your number; they'll just break in there, too.
However, we didn't want to be helpless. We shared our tale with press organizations worldwide. We appeared on TV, attended press conferences, and filed a complaint with the attorney general's office in El Salvador. Therefore, 14 of my coworkers at El Faro and I have chosen to sue NSO Group while being represented by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
We're not in it for the money, I can tell you of that; otherwise, we wouldn't be independent journalists. This is a development of our ongoing efforts in El Salvador to expose corrupt government officials. We are taking this action in the United States because El Salvador's coopted institutions have run out of legal options.
Additionally, this is not just for us. The gadgets of over 450 law-abiding men and women from all around the world whose devices had been compromised by NSO Group's Pegasus were listed by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in April. Many of them don't reside in nations or occupations where they can file lawsuits.
However, someone must. Executives of the NSO shouldn't be able to wash their hands after using their apparatus to harm journalists. In a practical sense, NSO let loose the hounds to hunt us down. And now we're retaliating.
