Making sense of Pegasus-derived data

Thanks to the groundbreaking investigative work of 16 media organisations internationally and The Wire in India, one now knows that the phone numbers of many in India appeared on a list of potential targets of surveillance by the Israeli spyware, Pegasus. This journalist’s name was not just on the list of potential targets of those whose phones may have been hacked. Not only that, his device was also confirmed to have been infected with Pegasus after a forensic test.

So, could the two incidents — the industrialist’s knowledge of the journalist’s private matters and the journalist’s phone having been infiltrated with Pegasus — be related or are they just coincidental? It is likely that the two incidents are linked, which then raises the question — how did the industrialist gain access to this information from this journalist’s phone and who else had and has this access?.

Radhey Radhey ..

In the example of the journalist cited here, Pegasus would have transmitted messages, emails, phone calls, pictures, video, camera, location and other such information from the journalist’s phone. But how exactly was this daily data, which was sent from the journalist’s phone, turned into meaningful information of specific financial transactions and conveyed to the industrialist? Pegasus software can only transmit data, it does not and cannot comprehend it.

The buyer spent such a large sum on each person to be able to listen to phone calls, watch movements, read messages, and capture each element of the individual’s life. But this cannot be done by Pegasus or any other machine. It needs a human on the other end to be able to listen, read and watch the person being spied on by Pegasus. Only a human can make sense of all the information that Pegasus sends from the infected phone.

.

Pegasus transmits information from the infected phone non-stop (24x7x365). To gather all this data, decipher and analyse it, it would take at least a two-three member backend team for each person being snooped on. Given the possibly large-scale nature of the hack, it would take a few more thousand people on the backend to turn all of the Pegasus-transmitted data into meaningful and useful information for the buyer. Surely, the buyer did not spend all that money on Pegasus just to get a daily dump of data with no one to analyse it?.