It probably should come as no surprise that the Trump administration is trying to give themselves all sorts of new, very intrusive powers against American citizens who might want to protest against them.
And this is a subject that I think there is a real media challenge in terms of conveying the seriousness of this stuff, and I have struggled with myself. This is a story that I care about a lot. I think it's hard to convey. It's hard to get people to picture exactly the risk here.
Not too long ago, a couple years ago, I wrote the introduction to this book. It's called Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy. I did not write this book. It's an excellent book. It's written by two amazing investigative, award-winning journalists from France. I wrote the introduction to that book, though, because I've been basically standing on my head, contorting myself, trying to figure out a way to do this story, how to make it make sense to an American audience—that we need to watch out now, in this generation, today.
We need to watch out for a kind of authoritarian surveillance technology that was never, ever available to authoritarian regimes in the past, but is available to authoritarian regimes now. And in our time, this technology has been sitting on the table like a loaded gun, waiting for a would-be dictator to come to power in America and use it against us.
You may remember when The Washington Post columnist and longtime Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was kidnapped and murdered. You may remember the salient detail that they cut up his body with a bone saw. Responsibility for Khashoggi's murder has been laid squarely at the feet of the Saudi government. The tactical means by which they got to him has in part been laid to a piece of spyware, cell phone spyware called Pegasus.
It's spyware that infects your phone. They target your phone. You don't have to do anything wrong to be infected with it. You don't have to click on anything or do anything. They infect your phone with spyware without you ever knowing it. Your phone shows no sign of it. But once they have infected your phone, they get access to everything that is on your phone and everything that you do with your phone.
They can access its location at any time. They can turn on the microphone to hear what's happening where you are. They can turn on the camera to see you and what's around you. They can see all of the photos on your phone, all of your contacts, all of your messages, all of your notes to self—everything. Even stuff that you might think is encrypted. It's not encrypted when you look at it on your phone. If you can look at it on your phone, they will have it.
People close to Jamal Khashoggi were found to have had their phones targeted with Pegasus software before he was murdered. Pegasus has been used to target opposition politicians and activists and lawyers and journalists all over the world, some of whom have subsequently been assassinated by despotic regimes.
When this kind of spyware surveillance tool emerged as a favored weapon for authoritarian governments and murderous dictatorships around the world, the Joe Biden administration banned the U.S. government from ever using that particular spyware or anything like it.
Well, then Donald Trump was elected, and the Trump administration has now quietly reversed that ban. And indeed, they have now contracted with a company that makes exactly that same kind of spyware as Pegasus.
And which part of the Trump administration is using it? Which part of the Trump administration has been given this surveillance tool? ICE. And are they using it just against immigrants? Yeah, right. As if.
Headline in The Washington Post: ICE amps up its surveillance powers. ICE's acting director says the agency will deploy its elite investigative officers to probe anti-ICE protest networks. Former officials have expressed concern that ICE now has a green light not only to monitor immigrant communities, but also to carry out broad surveillance of Americans exercising their First Amendment right to oppose government action—U.S. citizens who may not themselves be suspected of crimes.
According to the Electronic Privacy Information Center: "We don't know if law enforcement or ICE are even getting search warrants to deploy this software."
Paragon, the company that makes this version of the no-click, take-over-your-phone software, which Trump has now given to ICE—Paragon software has been used by the Italian government to infect the phones of opposition politicians and activists who help immigrants.
PenLink, another surveillance company that provides real-time location data about you to the government without a warrant, has been used in the past to target opposition politicians and activists in Mexico and also in Hong Kong.
Now our government, and specifically ICE, has those and more—again, supposedly to use in their mission against immigrants, but also apparently to use against Americans who are protesting against them. And to use that stuff with or without a warrant, and with or without any restraint at all.
This turns your own phone into a spy against you. This is a surveillance capability I have been laying awake at night thinking about for the past couple of years. Now Trump is in power, and Americans are protesting against him every single day of the week and twice on Sundays. And so naturally, he is happily signing the contracts that give his government this power, and he is handing this power to the most untrained, most lawless, most aggressive pseudo-military parts of his government to use against American citizens—without warrants and without us being notified that it's happening.
