The New Yorker -- The Technology the Trump Administration Could Use to Hack Your Phone
By Ronan Farrow
November 20, 2024
In recent years, a number of Western democracies have been roiled by controversies in which spyware has been used, apparently by defense and intelligence agencies, to target opposition politicians, journalists, and apolitical civilians caught up in Orwellian surveillance dragnets. Now Donald Trump and incoming members of his Administration will decide whether to curtail or expand the U.S. government’s use of this kind of technology. Privacy advocates have been in a state of high alarm about the colliding political and technological trend lines...
...Michael Waltz, who, as a congressman, successfully advocated for the expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, rooting his arguments in a desire to deport undocumented immigrants for the sake of national security. (“The fastest growing group entering through our southern border is now from China, our number one adversary,” Waltz told the House at the time.) Within hours of Trump’s election to a second term, ice—which is still under the authority of President Biden, but which has often seemed sympathetic to Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric—put out a new call for private companies to submit plans for augmenting the agency’s surveillance infrastructure, including ankle monitors, and software and hardware used for tracking targets’ biometrics. Human Rights Watch, responding to ice’s deal with Paragon in October, warned that expanding the agency’s surveillance infrastructure would exacerbate “concerns about ICE abusing people trying to cross the US-Mexico border, surveilling border communities, and surveilling, harassing, interrogating, detaining, and blocking journalists, lawyers, and activists working on or near the border.” Immigration lawyers told me that such an expansion would create a frightening digital panopticon, not just for the 3.7 million people awaiting immigration hearings and the millions more who have managed to avoid immigration enforcement measures but for the wider population. “The fact that it’s the Department of Homeland Security, in particular, that has the technology means it may not be used exclusively for immigration and deportation,” Tucker, of the Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology, told me. “D.H.S. is often the chosen agency to acquire technologies that are legally questionable because they are, in practice, subject to less oversight than basically all the other federal agencies.”...
...In 2019, the F.B.I. secretly purchased Pegasus through a government contractor. (The F.B.I. director, Christopher Wray, told Congress that the spyware had been acquired for limited testing purposes, but internal documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the New York Times show that the agency seriously considered deploying it operationally, and even drew up guidelines for prosecutors navigating disclosures about its use.) In 2021, the same F.B.I. contractor purchased another NSO Group technology, a phone-tracking solution called Landmark. The same year, the Commerce Department added NSO Group and other spyware-makers to a list of entities blocked from doing business with American companies. The Biden Administration later issued an executive order, plans for which were first disclosed in this magazine, banning the “operational use by the United States Government of commercial spyware that poses risks to national security or has been misused by foreign actors to enable human rights abuses.” These measures were limited and already left ample loopholes. In an interview for a new documentary, “Surveilled,” that followed my reporting on the subject, Nathaniel C. Fick, the Biden Administration’s Ambassador-at-Large for Cyberspace and Digital Policy, defended the “legitimate law enforcement and national security uses of these technologies,” and declined to answer my questions about specific measures for such use. Few legal experts I spoke with expected the Trump Administration to continue even such halting efforts to self-police government surveillance—nor did they expect that a potential Justice Department under Matt Gaetz would aggressively champion the already porous protections afforded by case law interpreting the Fourth Amendment in the context of personal data privacy. Tucker added, “With Trump making it clear that he envisions executive authority as being subject to no legal restraints, with the kind of appointments he’s made, and with the composition of Congress, they believe they can essentially do whatever they want with this technology—to immigrant communities, to activists.”...
Trump has threatened his political enemies, reposting comments calling for a military tribunal for Liz Cheney and observing that General Mark Milley’s behavior would have once been punishable by “DEATH!” He has also demonized the free press, suggesting, for example, that he wouldn’t mind if people were to “shoot through the fake news” and that journalists who protect sources should be imprisoned. These comments target the populations that have been most vulnerable to overzealous spyware campaigns in other Western democracies. “When this happens in an authoritarian system, it is horrific but unsurprising,” Seaford, the technology executive who was hacked during Greece’s spyware campaign, told me. “When it happens in a democracy, however, it creates a sense of disorientation: ‘Could this happen to me? Here? Really?!’ And yet it can, and it does.”
https://archive.ph/8osL8
Ronan Farrow has been investigating spyware surveillance for years.
If you think it can't happen to average consumers, think again.
