morris, not all athletes, a concern by the restrictions that they focus on winning olympic gold. you can call them big groups in the dining or you're going to span you a little bubble of 4 or 5 people the whole time and stay the room and all of that. that's exactly how i've always treated games. like it hasn't been a big sociable experience for me. it's all about the competition and so it's going to be pretty routine. that sense of isolation is set to continue in the fan las empty stadiums that will surround and olympics like, no other. andy richardson, al jazeera, tokyo, ah, this is eleanor. they were, these are the top stories flooding in china's head on problems with kimberly 16 people. and it's after the heavy rainfall in generations or downpours are forecast and authorities. a warning, a den, a dam could get collapse. katrina, you as more from aging while we've just spoken to a local in jung,

joe city and he's told us that the rain has subsided for at least 30 minutes. but the warning is that more showers and rain are expected over the next 2 days, at least. so the government emergency response level remains on red alert, which is the highest level. and currently in the region, a rescue teams have been sent to help rescue people in danger or help with the clean up process. the headlines and the leader of 10th. and he is main opposition. parties been arrested freeman and boy and 10 other team a party members were detained over night in the city of wonder. they were planning to or they were planning a conference to demand constitutional reforms. authority say they were arrested for inciting unauthorized assembly. public gatherings have been restricted to curb, to spread of co, 5th, 19 police, and my dear, you have secured the release of more than 100 villages who were kidnapped 6 weeks ago in northwest and foreign state. most of them were women and children. indonesia

reported its highest daily death toll since the pandemic began with 1400 people, it is currently dealing with the worst outbreak in asia. covered 19 restrictions have been extended until july 25th. also, india recording its high daily death telling a month, almost 4000 people dying. that figure surged off the state of marashi updated its unreported counts. and me and mar is facing its worst search in infections. healthcare workers have been struggling with shortages of oxygen efforts to contain . the virus had been thrown into chaos and the military coup back in february, cypress is appealed to the un security council. every turkey bank planned to reopen and abandoned town on the island. greek cypriots who represent the island internationally for the plan is designed for turkish cypriots to resettle in the town of osha. we've got another news coming up you in around 25 minutes time. next the inside story with rob madison. news.

news. news. ah, it was meant to fight terrorism and crying, but many governments ended up using pegasus fireware to attack journalists, an activity. some world leaders have also been targeted. so how much of us right is advance technology to privacy and human rights. this is inside story. ah hello, welcome to the program. i'm rob matheson governments have been hacking into people's privacy for years. shoes officially sanctioned listening stations dotted around the

world, sucking in vast amounts of phone signals and other data, and picking out trigger words or phrases as well as hijacking information. some of the technology to do it is for sale and tens of thousands of politicians. journalists, lawyers, and activists. so being targeted the systems called pegasus, someone who's really spyware, company called and s o group. thanks evidence collected by the parents based and g o forbidden stories. and the rights group, amnesty international. it seems that our 50000 people whose phones have been selected. most of the numbers were in gulf countries and north africa, but others include india, pakistan, and france. and so group denies any longer and says that report is full of wrong assumptions. on the phone numbers of 14, hence the state is said to have been targeted for potential surveillance. the include pakistan's prime minister in milan, con, south african president, civil from pose, and the french president emanuel mac chrome. the monk newspaper says mccombs phone

number is on the list selected by morocco's intelligence service for potential cyber spying. if the allegations approve true, the president staff say it would be very serious. morocco was denied using packets of spyware and it's rejected what it says or groundless allegations. other chosen phones is said to be those belonging to people close to saudi janos jamal facility who was murdered at the saudi embassy in turkey in 2018 media organizations. working on the pegasus investigation say more than a 180 journalists have been found on the list, including 25 in mexico. here's what one mexican journalist had to say. there when you get to get, get it done, but he does. may he cannot. i think almost all mexican journalists know and feel that we have a certain type of surveillance and espionage. we just assumed that because mexico is one of the most dangerous countries to work as a journalist, mexican president under as manuel lucas with adult is not looking at allegations of

spying by the administration of his predecessor. the case, guardian, newspaper reported on monday that at least 50 people close to a door may have been targeted for president and ricky opinion, yet all was in power. and india is opposition. parties of accused prime minister, not enter morty, of compromising national security there, demanding an investigation into claims the government spied against journalists and politicians, including the main opposition leader ruffled gandhi indian government denies using unauthorized surveillance. ah ok, let's bring in our guests. we have russia, roxanne, who's director of amnesty tech at the international secretary of amnesty international. she's joining us from london. we have professor ronald dba, whose founder and director of citizen lab at university of toronto is mung school in toronto. and we also have my daughter rashid talking to us from london. she is a visiting professor at the middle east center, the london school of economics. welcome to you all,

russia. i know that you can't really talk about the source of all the information that you received for obvious reasons you want to protect your sources. but when all the evidence was beginning to come together and form a picture, what was your reaction? so i think we had always suspected and we had done previous reporting to show that and by where it had been misused by governments around the world to target human rights activists. john, less noisy is. but i think what this investigation shows is really the unprecedented scale of abuse of use of this technology. i think we always knew that, but we did our research and as cases kept on stuff, the thing it really made us realize how widespread global this problem is. and really, that's an ludicrous claim,

but byler use only in crime, terrorism related investigations, if it's absurd investigation show, was there any particular pattern that started to emerge in terms of the types of people that were being charged as well as investigation show? it's really not just criminals and terrorists who've been talking to the fire. we have terminus. we have keep in mind that we have lawyers, we have had to state as revealed recently. so this is an absurd claim by, by n a. so group, it's not just the case of a few bulk actors or a few kind of an essay, but he's in the knology. this is really a global phenomenon, a global problem. we've identified client in the investigation such as india by john marco, and others who b, y were magically to target human rights activists and journalists. so really this

is not an exception. and i just think, i think we can continue to claim that it's an exception given the massive scale of the revelations that have come to life. metalli's auto see you were one of those whose phone was targeted. how did you feel when you find out? indeed, 1st i would like to see to national and the security nap died, which who contacted me with you asked me to submit my phone to the investigation and i was lucky this time actually, i mean there was a bummer abilities. i always expected this child division to hack my phone and they tried in 2014 to hack my twitter account and they were successful. but after 2018 and the murder of german, german o terribly eggs are very, very vulnerable. and we had,

we heard for the 1st time about it. so when did i need, who is an ex 9 in canada through citizen and thank you for acting us to the fact that his phone was packed and i took my own precaution and i paid a lot of money to present my phone, but there were no guarantees i even went on a course to teach me how to protect my devices. but obviously there's no protection against this powerful and malicious program. and it was expected. it was only a matter of time. and there was cheating on her ability. that is the feeling of intrusion, their anger, but also i was actually lucky, according to the evidence that was given to me,

that the attempt was successful. however, it was, it was expected and all of us who work on human rights who are active and they were all in one way or another. and from the open messages that we get on twitter to main hacking which is done in secret. and we had, over the last 20 years, especially after the murder of actually the black list on twitter and one of the people who propagated. this is nobody but their body was named in the united nation report and the report on the murder partial g as one of the people heavily involved in this. he was also involved in the torture

of the 7 is in prison for 3 years. so he op, that's out the participants in twitter, the whole world basically. and to draw a black list of names, he wanted to turn every citizen into a policeman in order to draw people who are against the regime, people who are new or people who shouldn't be element ages. and we like to twitter to that we adapted all the social media outlets as you use. and this was an open read code for people to write name in twitter that should be eliminated. yes, clearly is a process that was put in place. i want to move on to, to professor g, but because i want to get to the nature of the program itself without going into too much detail. i mean,

the n s o says that this program is undetectable. russia says that for obvious reasons, she can't, doesn't want to talk about her sources, but you start to discovering this back in 2016. are you able to tell us how it came to your attention? yes, absolutely. and thank you for having me. so you're right back in 2016. i'm a man sewer, who is a human rights defender in the united arab emirates, received suspicious text messages, meant to trick him into clicking on links that contain malware from an s o as pegasus system. and instead of clicking on them, he forwarded them to us at the citizen lab for analysis, we were able to actually infect a device of our own and capture a copy of pegasus by where we then analyzed it. reverse engineered, it started to understand how it communicates over the internet and through that

started mapping out its so called command and control infrastructure. so what a company like and so does, is set up a whole system that they provide to a client. and that communicates in certain ways over the internet that allows researchers such as ourselves, to be able to track what they're doing it's, it's not easy work, it's very challenging. but we were able to do that quite successfully beginning at that time. and what happened was essentially a kind of snowball effect. so shortly thereafter in 20172018, working with german once at the new york times, we uncovered massive widespread abuses in mexico. and as those pegasus system targeting journalists, lawyers, even family members of target, journalists who are murdered and cartel related hits even research scientists and

international investigators into mass disappearance in 2018. we produced a report basically showing the scope of n s o is global client base and the operations we found more than 30 clients at that time. who are undertaking, as you know, as in more than 40 countries around the world. shortly thereafter, as one of your guests mentioned, we were able to track down canadian permanent resident omar abdul aziz. we determined that his phone was hacked and we didn't realize that the time. but omar and jamal shoji were very close confidence and they were communicating for months over what they thought was a secure messaging app. they didn't realize that saudi operators were effectively eavesdropping on everything they were doing. let me interrupt you there because there is something that does occur to me. it is clear that there has been tangible evidence of what has been going on since that point. and yet,

here we are in 2021. we're still talking about this now. it just seems the scale has changed. why is nothing being done? well that's, that's an excellent question. i mean, obviously we've been raising awareness about this problem along with our partners, amnesty international and others in the community. so that the problems not new. the latest revelations simply explode the problem with evidence and a number of different directions. why isn't anything being done? while there are a number of reasons? first of all, we need government to move on this. for example, my colleagues as un and in other places are calling for more atoria on, on the sale and transfer of this type of technology until the abuses can be fixed. i agree with them. i think that will be great, but we need governments to move the ball forward. and that's not going to happen frankly, because governments at this point in time all have

a stake in this industry. it's an open secret if you will. every government has, if they don't have it already, a very well resource for an espionage agency or agencies, they are trying to develop one. and what companies like and i, so offer, is essentially off the shelf signal intelligence capacity. this is mercenary spyware, if you will. so what we need to do is have a coalition of governments champion this issue and saying it enough is enough. this is not only causing widespread human rights abuses. but i think one of the interesting findings of the most recent reports is it's also a major national security issue. you have state on state espionage occurring heads of state prime ministers, emanuel microns phone targeted. so the time has come for everyone to realize this

is a major global security issue. it's not just a human rights issue model. and let me ask you this. companies like and i so in the past who have been called, not on the scale but being find themselves in the situation, tend to use the same argument as i understand it, that ons, dealers and on sales. sales people use, which is that we will, we will do our best to put forward our systems to people that we believe to be trustworthy. but what they do with them after that or who they pass along to is not our responsibility. is that a reasonable argument? good? does the have to come a point where the end user, if you like, becomes responsible rather than the seller of the system? well, i think both, but if you compare this to the weapons market, the industry regulations in place and better government should not

send any kind of weapon to other government that might be used to decentralize the region or that use against their own population. but in a country like char uribe, and we have seen that the weapons, they have flags from the united states from britain. they launched a war in yemen. 46 years, i'm still going. and with no, by being able to stop that. i see the train with this spec knology, that's right, not only to us citizens but also to government. so there shouldn't be a new treaty that actually regulate the show of this kind often at the other problem is the privatization of security. and of course, we know that governments have intelligence agencies better than on spying, a need dropping technologies. and this is done under strict rule and

democracy. but in a country like saudi arabia and also israel, israel licenses. and to show this technology to a dictatorship in the region and claim that this is the only democracy in the world . and therefore, the responsibility chance is the headquarters off an assault which happens to be in the state of israel. and also the child as a dictatorship that uses this, that knology, again, i'm an academic center of the rent. and we should remember, of course, that this is not obviously restricted to saudi arabia. there are other countries in the gulf are set to be involved in this as well as well as we mentioned before, india, pakistan and, and mexico as well. this is a global phenomenon, but i take your point, rush of the rock, him vienna. so group has always maintained that it's not connected to the israeli

government, and yet the israeli government says it's going to set up some sort of task force in order to deal with a fall out of this not according to the u. k. guardian. there are going to be representatives on that task force of the israeli defense ministry, ministry of justice, foreign ministry, military intelligence, the ma side and national intelligence agency. how likely is it, do you think that the israeli government, or least, or it is very officials, might get access to the information that is being harvested by the pegasus program in other countries? so that's a very good question. and just before i answer, i just wanted to touch on the previous point about the analogy between the, the type of spyware on what the me now now, recently in an interview at the snowden bazaar, what can people do to protect that privacy against this type of spyware and his answer was. busy what can people do to protect themselves from nuclear weapons?

and, you know, he has a good point because they spyware. it's a weapon. it is a weapon against freedom, the press, it's a weapon against freedom of expression. it's a weapon against human rights. and it's the initial breach to the right to privacy how to put a domino effect on other violations of rights. you know, to time is used to target activists, john this human rights defender them. while it's very difficult to establish a link between the targeting, if somebody with the spyware, and then for example, the arbitrary arrest or bud buddy the serious questions about how the, why we're reduced and the real life consequences of even interceptions. and so it's not reasonable to expect that individual have to face up individually and, and really governments need to step up and regulate this by way, industry, which is completely out of control. and about your question about the, the top schools that have been set up in israel. unfortunately,

i don't have much hope that this is going to yield any form of meaningful accountability and meaningful change. for years. we've been doing great to transparency from, from state companies, and we've received excuses to do with national security, corporate secrecy, and others. what we need is a regulatory system, the actual t that can prevent these unscrupulous taxes from selling the equipment. and we'll mention the call from auditorium, which obviously international support. but also there is a responsibility that and israeli government. it's important to remember also how life obligations and it should not also licenses to the export of this type of equipment. if there is a risk that it would be, will be used to undermine human rights and investigation, has shown that there is ample evidence that this by way is being used and abused all around the world. busy by, by a numerous govern government. as i said, this is not an exception to the widespread problem. and finally,

i just like to say that, and i also have human rights responsibilities independent of states. obligation towards human rights. and group has faith at several time. but it has the power to stop access to it. system were received, credible evidence, but it's being diffused again. this investigation provides an abundance of evidence to show that it systems are being abused, left right and center. and so will actually take action. but it states that it is completely capable of doing modality. let me just ask you finally because we have a little bit of time left and given the changes that you've been forced to make to the security of your own phone. how concerned are you for your own safety, but also the safety of course, of your sources, the people that you talk to in countries around the world? not just of course in saudi arabia. yeah, absolutely. i mean, that strength also to go violence against me. and that is an example of

that. that is also the security of my private life and my family and above all, the security of the people i interview i talk to and i, dr. above the whole point about hacking, mindful and we're trying to hack it is to have access to my contact as an academic who they live on south beach and i have a commitment to giving them a voice as their voices are muted in the official narrative about the history of radio or the presence, i'm committed to am to find their voices and writing about them simply because no child inside there would dare write about. and therefore i have to, i have to worry about their own security if, if my phone is her, my conversations are best expressible through this malware and

therefore it is a responsibility events. i have an addition to my on security. i have to worry about my job. thank you very much indeed. and thanks to all our guest structure of the, our, him a run of the vote on the model of a sheet and thank you to for watching. you can see the program again any time by visiting our website, dot com for further discussion. go to our facebook page, that's facebook dot com, forward slash ha inside story. you can also join the conversation on twitter handlers at asia inside story, from the rob madison and the whole team. good bye for now. the who's the

news news, news news. lithium extraction is well under way at the full flats in the province of 4 point in northern argentina. it is referred to as the wire gold of renewable energy layer. a. we're trying to establish a small supply chain of lithium batteries so we can comply with demands. one of the demands is a transformation of the public transport system. argentina has one of the biggest in the region, and we would try to transform our bosses system. i didn't know what livia until we have around 70 percent of the world's lithium research live in liquid ryan. we are

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affairs. that matter to you, power it finds out the laws, new babies were dying. i did not think people in power investigate, exposes, and quinton, they used to be of our around the globe on how to get the news. this is al jazeera. ah, it's just going to 1800 hours gmc on come all santa maria, welcome to the news out from out of the extreme flooding is tearing through central china for around $200000.00 people to flee low lying areas.