MANAMA (Middle East Eye) – A Bahraini human rights defender says she “can simply no longer feel safe using my smartphone” after an investigation revealed that she and a Jordanian women’s rights campaigner had been hacked using the Zionist regime’s NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware.
“I now fear the worst and worry that the Bahrain government will be able to exploit my personal documents and family photos,” said Ebtisam al-Saegh, who has previously accused Bahrain’s security services of torturing and sexually assaulting her. She lives in Bahrain.
An investigation led by the human rights group Front Line Defenders (FLD) found that the mobile phones of al-Saegh and Hala Ahed Deeb, a lawyer who works with human rights and feminist groups in Jordan, had been hacked multiple times by countries using NSO Group spyware.
Al-Saegh’s iPhone was hacked at least eight times between August and November 2019 using Pegasus. Ahed Deeb’s mobile phone was found to have been infected with the spyware since March 2021.
Front Line Defenders worked with the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and Amnesty International’s Security Lab to verify their findings.
The group said the “impact of surveillance on women is particularly egregious and traumatizing, given how governments have weaponized personal information extracted through spyware to intimidate, harass and publicly smear the targets’ reputations.”
Hala Deeb is part of the legal team defending the Jordan Teachers Syndicate, which the kingdom’s government shut down in July 2020. The teachers’ union, one of Jordan’s largest, remains in conflict with the government and authorities.
Al-Saegh is a human rights defender who has worked for Salam for Democracy and Human Rights, a group that fights for democracy and human rights in Bahrain. She has previously been harassed by Bahraini authorities.
On 20 March 2017, al-Saegh was detained for seven hours at Bahrain International Airport after she returned from the 34th session of the UN Human Rights Council. She was interrogated for five hours and had her passport and mobile phone confiscated.
A couple of months later, interrogators from Bahrain’s National Security Agency abused her physically and verbally, and sexually assaulted her at Musharraq police station. According to her testimony, she was told that if she did not cease her activism she would be raped.
Bahrain normalized ties with the Zionist regime in September 2020. Pegasus was developed by the occupying regime’s cyber arms group NSO.
Once installed on a device, the spyware can harvest any data from it and transmit that back to the attacker. It can steal messages, photos, videos, recordings, location records, web searches, passwords, call logs, social media posts and can turn the phone into a remote listening device.
“My private property has been turned into a weapon against me,” al-Saegh said. “My right to privacy has been breached… I am not only concerned about surveillance but I am terrified that this breach will impose a serious threat to my safety and my life.”