Steve Coll writes:

Khadija Ismayilova, an investigative reporter from Azerbaijan, is an icon among the subtribe of journalists who work to expose cross-border financial corruption. She has broken big stories about money laundering and dodgy banking, despite being targeted by President Ilham Aliyev’s authoritarian regime. Operatives planted cameras in her home in Baku and, in 2012, released a video of her having sex with her boyfriend. In 2014, she was arrested on trumped-up charges that included tax evasion; a court sentenced her to seven and a half years in prison. The human-rights lawyer Amal Clooney, among others, took up Ismayilova’s cause, and she was released after eighteen months, but the government prohibited her from leaving the country for five years.

In May, Ismayilova learned from colleagues that her iPhone had been infected by spyware known as Pegasus, made by NSO Group, an Israeli company, which has reportedly worked with Azerbaijan’s government. The product can access contact lists and activate a phone’s microphone to record conversations. Last week, an investigation published by Forbidden Stories, a journalism nonprofit based in Paris, in collaboration with Amnesty International’s Security Lab and seventeen news organizations—including the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Le Monde—revealed apparent attempts worldwide to use Pegasus against journalists, human-rights activists, business executives, and politicians. The reporting suggested that, for all Apple’s claims that iPhones are secure, and for all the efforts of reporters and activists to use encrypted channels to thwart hostile governments, “unless you lock yourself in [an] iron tent, there is no way” to defeat unscrupulous spyware users, Ismayilova told Forbidden Stories.

In this gathering age of digital autocracy, it is hard to avoid the impression that the dictators are winning. A decade ago, the Arab Spring fostered hopeful visions of social-media-enabled people-power movements toppling anachronistic strongmen from Beijing to Riyadh and Caracas. Facebook, Twitter, and other messaging platforms remain transformative tools for mobilization in many countries, yet autocratic regimes have fought back ruthlessly by unleashing legions of loyalist censors, bots, and trolls to control online discourse, and by using spyware to watch and harass troublesome journalists and dissidents. [Continue reading…]