RANEY ARONSON-RATH: If you would, tell me about what is Pegasus? And then when you started to understand what Pegasus was, how did you think about how you would be able to show that? RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Laurent and Sandrine, thank you so much for joining me today. I’m Raney Aronson-Rath, editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE, and this is the FRONTLINE Dispatch.

I’m joined by Laurent Richard, founder and executive director of Forbidden Stories, and Sandrine Rigaud, the organization’s editor-in-chief. Global Spyware Scandal: Exposing Pegasus is the new, two-part series from FRONTLINE and Forbidden Films that goes behind the scenes of the investigation, and it chronicles the responses from governments and institutions seeking to govern the largely unregulated spyware industry. RANEY ARONSON-RATH: They uncovered how Pegasus had been used on journalists, human rights activists, the wife and fiancée of the murdered Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi, and others. PAUL LEWIS: This could be transformative in terms of our understanding of the whole cybersurveillance industry. RANEY ARONSON-RATH: Together with journalists from sixteen other newsrooms around the world, including FRONTLINE, Forbidden Stories began a year-long investigation into the spyware. NEWS ARCHIVE: Activists, lawyers and journalists are reportedly among those who've been targeted by the phone spyware. SANDRINE RIGAUD: Pegasus was designed to infect phones like iPhones or Androids.

They suspected the list contained numbers selected for potential surveillance with a powerful spyware, called Pegasus. RANEY ARONSON-RATH, HOST: In 2020, the journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories, along with Amnesty International, got access to a leaked list of more than 50,000 phone numbers. LAURENT RICHARD: The device that you have in your pocket could be a spy that is spying on your life.

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