In the hands of an ill-intentioned government, the Pegasus spyware is a powerful weapon often used against civil society, lawyers, journalists and human rights activists. But if the powerful think they are safe from this informer, they are mistaken: it is also used against the allies of client regimes, and even against some of their members. Investigations by the media participating in “Project Pegasus” have already shown this in Morocco or Kazakhstan, and new revelations about the use of Pegasus now attest to this in a new country: Bahrain.
The Bahraini NGO Red Line for Gulf, based in London, revealed on Friday February 18 that the phones of three prominent members of civil society from the Persian Gulf kingdom were infected in 2021 with the Pegasus spyware, sold by the Israeli company NSO Group. More surprisingly, an analysis of some of the 50,000 numbers selected by NSO Group customers for possible hacking, which Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International consulted and shared with sixteen media outlets, carried out with the help of Red Line for Gulf, reveals that a Pegasus client was also interested in dozens of phone numbers close to the regime, including loyalist parliamentarians, senior officials and even members of the royal family.
Pegasus is a very powerful spy software. Once installed on a phone, it not only allows you to listen to conversations and access real-time geolocation, but also to download all the history of messages contained on the phone, including those exchanged via secure applications. like Signal or WhatsApp. In the case of those close to the targeted regime, without having been able to carry out technical analyzes on their phones, it is impossible to say whether the interest of the Bahraini client of Pegasus has in fact resulted in a hack.
Lawyers and members of civil society
Among the three members of civil society whose analyzes have on the other hand been able to confirm such hacking is the lawyer Mohammed al-Tajer. His phone was hacked three times between September 2 and September 27, 2021, just a week after an investigation emerged that revealed he had been spied on using another surveillance software.
Mohammed al-Tajer is not just any Bahraini lawyer: known for his fight for democratic reforms and for having defended many Bahraini activists, he was notably involved in the vast protest movements that inflamed the country in February 2011, and which had been violently repressed by the security forces. He has been the subject of many pressures: in addition to the infection of his phone, in 2011, by software competing with Pegasus, an intimate video of him and his wife was broadcast on the Internet.
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