On Wednesday, the Salvadoran media outlet ‘El Faro’ published a report stating that 22 members of its staff were spied on with the Pegasus system for more than a year. The situation has been denounced by several organizations and highlights the difficulty of reporting in the Central American country.
An iPhone phone that could not be updated and rebooted itself at night. Between jokes of a possible espionage, that was the first hint so that the journalists Julia Gavarrete, from ‘El Faro’, and Xenia Oliva, from ‘GatoEncerrado’, thought that their phones could be bugged.
A doubt that the newspaper ‘El Faro’ cleared up on Wednesday: almost half of his team was under espionage with the Pegasus system during the mandate of Nayib Bukele, for more than a year. Situation shared by three journalists from ‘GatoEncerrado’, among other Salvadoran media.
After initial suspicions, the journalists turned to the Access Now Digital Security Helpline, an organization designed to protect the digital rights of citizens, which confirmed the infection on the devices analyzed and referred the case to Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity from the University of Toronto.
The conclusions After three months of investigations, they establish that, from June 29, 2020 to November 23, 2021, at least 22 members of ‘El Faro’ were intervened on 226 occasions by the espionage system.
“Several of us already suspected that our communications were being intercepted. The information we shared with each other was made public on social networks through trolls and Twitter accounts, on pages that share fake news,” said Gavarrete during a interview with the Committee to Protect Journalists.
This surveillance affected all sectors of the workforce: from journalists, to administrators and managers, they faced this assault on intimacy and private life.
3-month expert opinion carried out by the organizations Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity laboratory at the University of Toronto, and Access Now, an organization that watches over the protection of digital rights. The conclusion was validated by Amnesty International.@_the lighthouse_ pic.twitter.com/uHaN9xug5h
– Daniel Lizárraga (@danliza) January 13, 2022
For now, the main suspicions fall on the government of Nayib Bukele, for a number of reasons. The first, the Israeli company Grupo NSO has stated on several occasions that it only sells the Pegasus to governments. Secondly, the most intense periods of interventions were those in which the media published investigations that made the Government uncomfortable, such as that of the pact between him and the gangs or the secret negotiations of the Bukele brothers to introduce bitcoin as the national currency. In addition, President Bukele has had a complicated relationship with the media since he took power in 2019.
White, in a bottle and tastes like milk: I find it hard to imagine that the interventions come from an actor other than the Salvadoran State
“White, bottled and tastes like milk: I have a hard time imagining that the interventions come from an actor other than the Salvadoran State. The expert international organizations that conducted the analysis of our devices also have a hard time concluding anything different,” wrote Óscar Martínez, a journalist and editor-in-chief of ‘El Faro’, in an opinion article in ‘El País’.
For its part, the president’s communication office assured the Reuters agency that “the Government of El Salvador is not a client of NSO Group Technologies.” From the office, they even insinuated that senior executive officials could have also been hacked.
What makes eavesdropping with Pegasus different from an ordinary phone bug?
Pegasus is an espionage system owned by the Israeli company NSO Group, whose purpose is, supposedly, the surveillance of terrorist groups. But in the case of El Salvador, it has been used to steal private information from civilians.
This is not the first time this has happened: in a report published in 2020, Citizen Lab concluded that the Salvadoran State acquired a surveillance system from the company Circles, affiliated with the NSO Group, which had been used in the country since 2017 -with Salvador Sánchez Cerén as president with the FMLN party- until the same date of publication of the report.
But unlike the Circles prototype, with which you can monitor your phone or listen to calls without hacking it, the Pegasus system goes much further. According to Citizen Lab, with Pegasus the spy can do the same as the owner of the terminal, such as reading messages and chats -also encrypted ones like WhatsApp-, seeing photos and sending them, listening to calls and voice notes, etc.
In addition, it also has the ability to do things that not even the user himself can: steal login credentials from all kinds of accounts -such as the bank account- or turn on the microphone to listen to conversations.
“Pegasus makes your phone your own enemy and takes your entire personal world that’s on the device and puts it on the table, in front of someone who wants to hurt you, who wants to hurt you,” said Scott-Railton, a researcher at Citizen Lab. , to GatoEncerrado magazineaffected by espionage.
In November 2021, Apple sent an email to 14 members of ‘El Faro’, along with two political opponents and two other activists, where he warned them that they were at risk of espionage from “state-sponsored attackers.” On the same day, the US company filed a lawsuit against the NSO Group for unauthorized access to Apple mobile devices.
It has also been proven that countries such as Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, India, Azerbaijan or Morocco used Pegasus to spy on journalists, activists or opponents.
The disagreements between ‘El Faro’ and the Bukele government
The friction between the Government of Nayib Bukele and ‘El Faro’ is an open secret. Since he became president in 2019, the disputes between the ruler and the independent media have been constant.
In an opinion piece in ‘The New York Times’Salvadoran journalist Óscar Martínez, from ‘El Faro’, said that “democracy hinders Bukele” and called him authoritarian. An affirmation based on controversial policies applied by the president during the pandemic, such as the publication of decrees through his Twitter account or the Army’s surveillance exercise towards those who allegedly “violated” the Covid-19 quarantine.
After repeatedly lashing out at him, tensions reached a fever pitch when journalists from ‘El Faro’ and ‘Revista Factum’ were denied access to El Salvador’s Presidential House in September last year.
Episodes that were condemned by the international community, including a letter from a group of US congressmen asking for “respect” for journalists in El Salvador. Criticism that the president has either ignored, or has treated with disdain and has not even commented.
In what the digital newspaper points out as a strategy of “economic suffocation”, in July the Treasury began audits against ‘El Faro’ and in September Bukele announced that the public body was investigating the medium for alleged “money laundering and tax evasion” .
Another critical point in his relationship with ‘El Faro’ dates back to July 7, when El Salvador expelled Daniel Lizárraga, editor of the media outlet, with a notice specifying that he had 5 days to leave the country. Based on this decision, the Government assured that the immigration authorities had not been able to prove that Lizárraga was a journalist, despite his extensive experience as such. Something that from the journalistic writing branded as “persecution”.
Justo Lizárraga, a native of Mexico, is the only one of the affected journalists who has been affected by espionage for the second time. The first was during the mandate of Enrique Peña Nieto in Mexico, when the reporter was investigating a network of corruption that compromised Angélica Rivera, wife of the former president.
However, Óscar Martínez, editor-in-chief, was the most affected with a total of 42 interventions. After this, Carlos Martínez, with 28 punctures, one of them detected by Citizen Lab while the reporter was investigating the relationship between the Salvadoran government and the gangs. Carlos Dada, director of ‘El Faro’, was exposed to 12 punctures for 167 days.
After the publication of this espionage network, the media outlet warned its sources about the possible leak of their data and about hypothetical persecution for their collaboration.
“Our sources have decided to trust ‘El Faro’ despite the risks they knew that this implied and the consequences to which they were exposed. To all of them: thank you. We will continue to develop strategies to offer more and better guarantees for those who trust us” , communicated ‘El Faro’ to those affected through an editorial published this Thursday.
This discovery supposes a great violation of the privacy of the affected journalists, which can carry with it psychological consequences, since the illegal access has also been to their personal lives. Reason why several organizations for the right to information and the integrity of informants have denounced what happened.
No, it’s not easy knowing we’re being spied on. It is not, but it survives. We continue to do journalism thanks to brave people. That no espionage program will take away from us.
– Julia Gavarrete (@PetizaGavarrete) January 13, 2022
“No, it’s not easy knowing we’re being spied on. It’s not, but we survive. We continue to do journalism thanks to brave people. No espionage program will take that away from us,” journalist Julia Gavarrete said on social media.
From ‘El Faro’ they have promised they will continue doing journalism despite the attempts to intimidate. In Martínez’s words, “we are not going to stop. We are journalists, we understand the importance of journalism at this time and we will do journalism.” A promise to all Salvadorans and Salvadorans.
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