This past week, the White House detailed the scope of the massive Chinese hacking campaign

that's infiltrated at least eight U.S. telecommunications companies

of foreign power reaping information from American cell phone networks.

But an HBO original documentary called Surveiled, which is available to stream now on Max,

says some governments around the world

use commercial spyware to monitor their own citizens.

Spyware is this powerful surveillance tool. Big spyware companies say they sell this tech only to

governments, but this multi-billion dollar industry is mostly unregulated.

The most advanced spyware can turn your smartphone into a spy in your pocket.

It can copy everything and record you without you ever knowing, and then just disappear without a trace.

Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist Ronan Farrow produced the documentary.

Ronan, is there a difference between the Salt Typhoon hack that's been in the news so much and what you're covering, what you report on here?

Well, there is, but there's also a shared theme here.

Our data is becoming more and more accessible, porous, and that goes for critical national

security sensitive infrastructure. It goes for data held by major telecom firms. And it goes for

what's examined in this documentary, which is our phones, which fascinated me as a reporter who's dealt with various forms of surveillance.

And then when I saw that the bleeding edge of that technology, of those kinds of efforts,

were so advanced that you could turn any phone into a listening device if you have the resources,

I realized, well, this is not an incidental issue. This is not some

esoteric human rights problem that's far away. This is coming for all of us. You've got an example in

the documentary. This is a member of the European Parliament from Catalonia, which is a region in

northeastern Spain. This politician favors independence from Spain.

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