The Financial Times has busted General Paul Kagame’s deadly spying network that often leads to death of his critics. As The Financial Times explains:
“In the two decades since Paul Kagame became president of Rwanda, dozens of dissidents have disappeared or died in unexplained circumstances around the world.”
The newspaper digs deeper to show how Kagame has turned to sophisticated technologies to track his opponents. It turns out Kagame is using, in particular, Israeli technologies to target his critics – especially those using WhatsApp:
“Powered by a technology built not in Rwanda but in Israel, the calls were a harbinger of Pegasus, an all-seeing spyware so powerful that the Israeli government classifies it as a weapon. Developed and sold by the Herzlia-based NSO Group, which is part-owned by a UK-based private equity group called Novalpina Capital, Pegasus was designed to worm its way into phones…start transmitting the owner’s location, their encrypted chats, travel plans – and even the voices of people the owners met – to servers around the world.”
The Financial Times also indicates how WhatsApp fought back:
“In recent days, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which studies digital surveillance around the world and is working in partnership with WhatsApp, started to notify journalists, human rights activists and other members of civil society…whose phones had been targeted using the spyware. It also provided help to defend themselves in the future.”
Kagame is busted once again. For more details, read The Financial Times’“Inside WhatsApp hack: how an Israeli technology was used to spy: Countries from Rwanda to Saudi Arabia accused of spying on dissidents and journalists.” This first rate analysis is authored by Mehul Srivastava in Tel Aviv and Tom Wilson in Nairobi.
