High-Profile Human Rights Lawyers Targeted in Mexico Spyware Scandal Maria Verza and Frank Bajak - Associated Press
go to original August 3, 2017

Mexico is investigating allegations of online spying against prominent journalists and activists (Al Jazeera)

Mexico's surveillance scandal widened Wednesday to encompass a pair of prominent human rights attorneys probing a multiple homicide case whose victims include a photojournalist and an activist.

The internet watchdog Citizen Lab said Karla Micheel Salas and David Pena were targeted in 2015, weeks after they questioned prosecutors' handling of the killings of activist Nadia Vera, journalist Ruben Espinosa and three other women in a Mexico City apartment in July that year. The victims were tortured and shot to death.

The lawyers' cellphones were targeted by messages designed to infect them with the same spyware that Citizen Lab previously determined was sent to 19 Mexican individuals or groups, the cyber-sleuths said in a research note. One said she believed she was infected by it.

Other Mexican targets of the sophisticated Pegasus spyware, made by Israel-based NSO Group, have included journalists investigating high-level corruption, opposition politicians and activists, and international experts critical of the government's probe into the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from a rural teachers college.

NSO Group says it only sells Pegasus — which lets attackers siphon away the contents of cell phones and clandestinely convert them into eavesdropping devices — to governments for use against criminals and terrorists.

University of Toronto-based Citizen Lab said those conditions were clearly violated in Mexico — though it says it has no conclusive proof of government involvement.

Read the rest at NBC News

Related: $1 Billion Surveillance Company's Tools 'Spied on Mexico Mass Murder Lawyers' (Forbes)

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