Mexico Spied on Human Rights Investigators & Families of Missing Students Instead of the Kidnappers

[L. Coyote]

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/7/12/mexico_spied_on_human_rights_investigators

July 12, 2017 -- Watch Full Show

The Mexican government reportedly used an Israeli-made spy software called Pegasus to surveil a team of international investigators dispatched to Mexico to investigate the high-profile disappearance of 43 students in 2014. For more, we speak with Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, and Stephanie Erin Brewer, a human rights attorney who was among those targeted by the NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware attack.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Mexico, where a new report by the Citizen Lab has revealed the Mexican government used Israeli-made spy software to surveil a team of international investigators who had dispatched to Mexico to investigate the high-profile disappearance of 43 students at the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college in Guerrero in 2014. The targeted individuals included some of Latin America’s most prominent lawyers, who had been granted a form of diplomatic immunity to carry out their investigation. The Citizen Lab has also reported that the Mexican government also used the spying software called Pegasus to spy on Mexican human rights activists and journalists. Some of the targeted activists and journalists are now suing the Mexican government, after learning they had been surveilled. This is award-winning journalist Carmen Aristegui.

CARMEN ARISTEGUI: [translated] This is an operation by the state where the agents of the Mexican state, far from doing what they should do legally, have instead utilized our resources, our taxes, our money to commit serious crimes. And it has to be realized that the head of the Mexican states—that is, the president of Mexico—that is the first.

AMY GOODMAN: Citizen Lab reported that the infection attempts took place in early March of 2016, shortly after the international investigators had criticized the Mexican government for interference in their investigation .................