After years to design surveillance and interception systems, an expert publishes a book in which he alerts the excesses of certain tools, in particular the Pegasus software.
Interview by
Guilhem Giraud is an Intelligence Subject: this expert in surveillance technologies and listening worked for years for the French State, at the Directorate of Territory Surveillance (DST) and at the Ministry of Justice in particular. He then worked in the private sector, collaborated with the French company Amesys, involved in the installation in Libya of Muammar Gaddafi of a mass surveillance system, and on his own, for various states and governments.
He publishes, Thursday, September 29, confidences of a French intelligence agent (Robert Laffont). By his story, unprecedented in this environment, he wishes to alert opinion on the excesses of a secret world. He is concerned in particular with the drifts of Pegasus software, used to spy on activists, journalists and political leaders in many countries.
You have made a career in a sensitive and secret sector. What pushed you to make a book?
I was shocked by my contact with NSO in 2016. This is where I started questioning myself and considering communicating to awaken consciences about this kind of practices.
What happened?
At the time, I had a consulting contract with a government from a Gulf country to help them secure communications from the royal family and the Prime Minister. I then work almost daily with a prince who gives me his requests. One morning, in front of my office, I find an adviser to the head of state who awaits me, a visit that I have never received before. In general, I am sent to me a soldier, it is always the same hierarchical channel. There, not at all.
The advisor says to me: “You have to call this guy”, an NSO leader, “it’s for a great system, that we want to have”. For me, it was a sign that we were outside of any procedure. The advisor says to me: “With, we can listen to everyone.” But what is it? He just tells me that we can listen to everyone, even the people who we think are our friends. I know he repeats something that has been suggested to him. I think that the NSO salesperson who had shown them had managed to find keys.
I now understand that what Nso proposed each time was to get rid of the legal listening procedures. With a country [Israel, where NSO Group is based] which gives itself no rule for the sale and use of this spy software, you can go somewhere and say “Do you want to listen to Tartempion? No one will be aware”. “You can listen to all over the world”: that’s what NSO sold.
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