This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 22nd, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Journalists, activists, and even high-ranking government officials are among those probably targeted by sophisticated

hacking produced by an Israeli cyber security company, and the implications couldn't be bigger

for freedom of the press and attempts to advance civil society worldwide.

Cato's Pat Ellington and Julian Sanchez comment.

This isn't the first time that journalists, I mean not by a long shot that journalists have been

targeted for surveillance and collection of their information, but tell us about this case, Julia.

So this is a pretty extraordinary story in part because it's coming from a consortium, the Pegasus

consortium of media organizations across many different countries that have combined forces to report out a story based on a data

leak first apparently obtained by Amnesty International, but they obtained what appears to be a target list with about 50,000 phone numbers.

They have tied to the Israeli-based surveillance company, NSO Group, which sells essentially spyware and exploits

to governments around the world. NSO strongly claims that its software is only supposed to be used to track serious criminals and terrorists,

but what the Pegasus media organizations were able to find, Pegasus, by the way, is the name of the flagship piece of spyware produced by NSO group.

What these organizations were able to find was that this list

contained numbers of large numbers of journalists, political officials, opposition leaders, human rights activists, and they were able to identify

about a thousand of these and got access to about 67 cell phones that were on this target list and found that more than half of them showed signs of either having been compromised or signs of attempted compromise by by NSO malware and this

included the fiance and widow of murdered Saudi writer Jamal Koshogi, who had been a columnist for the Washington Post,

among an younger of other prominent reporters and human rights activists clustered heavily in

Mexico and the Middle East and India but they found targets in I believe about

50 countries around the world.

So this is a, you know, we don't know what percentage of the numbers on this list whose origins

...