Surveillance & Spyware
Mass surveillance, commercial spyware and the wiretaps that turned phones into informants — the watchers and the watched.
- № 01
Snowden: The Thumb Drive That Exposed PRISM
Edward Snowden leaked NSA documents exposing PRISM and bulk surveillance, forcing a global reckoning over mass data collection and accelerating encryption.
- № 02
Pegasus: The Spyware Governments Aimed at Journalists
Pegasus, NSO Group's zero-click spyware, surfaced in a leak of fifty thousand numbers tying governments to surveillance of journalists and dissidents.
- № 03
Vault 7: The Insider Who Leaked the CIA's Hacking Tools
Vault 7 was WikiLeaks' 2017 release of roughly nine thousand documents on the CIA's hacking tools, leaked by a frustrated engineer inside the agency itself.
- № 04
The Athens Affair: Wiretapping a Prime Minister
Around the 2004 Athens Olympics, intruders quietly switched on Vodafone Greece lawful-intercept to wiretap the prime minister and a hundred officials.
- № 05
Hacking Team: 400GB of a Spyware Firm, Leaked
Phineas Fisher dumped 400GB of Italian spyware firm Hacking Team's emails, customer list, and source code, exposing its sales to repressive regimes.
- № 06
Operation Triangulation: The Zero-Click iPhone Spy Chain
Kaspersky discovered a zero-click iOS implant on its own employees' iPhones. The exploit chain hinged on an undocumented hardware register hidden inside Apple's CPU.
- № 07
Cellebrite vs. Signal: A Forensic Tool Undone
After Cellebrite claimed it could parse Signal, Moxie Marlinspike reverse-engineered its forensic device and found code-execution bugs that taint its reports.