This book probably works best as a companion piece to the Forbidden Stories consortium of articles about Pegasus. And a more accurate subtitle would be something like, How an unlikely cohort of publications, journalists tech nerds exposed one of the world’s most invasive spy tools.
It’s a book of personal stories and extraordinary bravery. It is an accounting of government duplicity and power-hungry despots, but those folks are also the usual suspects. There aren’t a ton of genuine surprises in the accounting.
The authors also miss some really obvious motives amongst the users of Pegasus. The manifest intent is not necessarily the gathering of kompromat against journalists. Intelligence services are in the same business as journalists, they just report to a much smaller audience. Journalists are gathering intelligence. Intelligence services want the journalists’ intelligence, for their own reasons. It’s not shocking that journalists found spyware on their phones, it’s shocking that they were shocked. Every journalist should assume that every government is trying to steal their intel, every second of every day. The existence of this brand of software has always been a reasonable surmise.
The most interesting parts of the Pegasus story are not contained in this book. We wonder what happened inside NSO during the investigation. Did they spot signs of the journalists rooting out Pegasus? What was happening at Apple at this time? We get a couple of pages of canned statements from those entities and little else.
It’s not a bad book, but if you haven’t read the Pegasus stories it’s like watching a behind-the-scenes documentary about a movie you haven’t seen. There are compelling elements, but it’s a bit wanting for the uninitiated.
At least 2/3 of the Pegasus story is not found within the pages of this book. If someone ever gets inside info on Apple and NSO, THAT book will be a darn good read. This one isn’t bad.