hopes, handshakes, and high fines are all been that the athletes village competitors have been told they could be kicked out of the games if they ignore regulations, aimed at preventing the spread of corona virus. the not all athletes. a concern by the restrictions that they focus on winning olympic gold. you can congregate them big groups in the dining hall. you get a 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 into the fan las empty stadiums that will surround an lympics like no other. andy richardson, al jazeera, tokyo ah, can validate her with a headlines on al jazeera, the senior most us general says,

tell about fight is now control nearly half of the countries, $400.00 plus districts. mark mitty says the group has strategic momentum, as it takes over new areas. all this says us troops pull out. i would tell you that as of today, more or less, i guess it's about $212213.00 in that range. 2 hundreds of the district centers are in taliban control. it's about half of the $41900.00 that are out there. you've got 34 provincial capitols in afghanistan. none of them have been seized as of today by the taliban. although the taliban is putting pressure on the outskirts of probably half of them, 17 of them in fact. and what they're trying to do is isolate the major population centers. at least 25 people have died in severe flooding and china's central and on province of the heaviest rainfall. since records began 200000 people. as they moved to safety and this concerns the dam could collapse. the trinity red crescent says

at least 17 migrants from bangladesh of drowns, trying to cross the mediterranean sea. the boat sank of the setting off is lee from the water on libya as north west coast. $380.00 people were rescued by the trinity and coast guard drug manufacturer, johnson and johnson, and 3 big distributors have agreed to pay $26000000000.00 to resolve thousands of claims over their role in the us. opioid epidemic lawsuits accused. the companies of letting the pain killers reach addicts to illegal channels. police and protest is of, clashed outside greece is parliament during a rally against mandatory corona virus, vaccinations for health care work and it was the 2nd thought rally in a week. cover 19 infections have been rising in greece in recent weeks with almost 3000 cases reported on wednesday. load all the headlines. i'll have another update for you here on al jazeera and about 30 minutes time. right off the inside story. we'll see soon, bye bye for me.

ah, ah ah, ah, it was meant to fight terrorism and crime, but many governments ended up using pegasus fireware to attack journalists inactive . it. 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. huge, officially sanctioned listening stations dotted around the world,

sucking in vast amounts of phone signals and other data on 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 n s o group. thanks evidence collected by the parents based n g o forbidden stories. and the rights group, amnesty international. it seems that are 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 as so, group denies any long doing and says that report is full of wrong assumptions. on the phone numbers of 14 heads, the status said to have been targeted for potential surveillance. the include pakistan's prime minister in milan, con, south african president, civil from a poser and the french president, emanuel mac chrome. the mones 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 a 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. they went to, you could get it done, but he doesn't. he cannot. i think almost all mexican journalists know and feel that we have a certain type of surveillance of espionage. we just assumed that because mexico is one of the most dangerous countries to work as a journalist, mexican president under as manuel lopez over the door 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 dog may have been targeted for president enrique pinion, yet all was in power. and india is opposition. parties of accused prime minister, not in ramadi 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 about our team, who's director of amnesty tech at the international secretary of amnesty international. she's joining us from london. we have professor ronald dba, who's founder and director of citizen lab at university of toronto as monk school in toronto. and we also have my w. rashid talking to us from london. she's 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 i 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 abusive use of this technology. i think we always knew that, but we did our research and cases kept on stuff. the thing, it really made me realize how white bright i'm global problem is. and really that, and i so ludicrous claim byler use only and quick climb

terrorism related investigations if it's absurd as his investigation shows. was there any particular pattern that started to emerge in terms of the types of people that were being target, as well as this investigation show? it's really not just criminals and terrorists who've been targeted with the spyware . we have germany, we have keep in mind that we have noise. we have had to state as which is revealed recently. so this is an absurd claim by, by n a so group. and it's not just the case of a few actors or fewer clients that are using the st. knology. this is really a global phenomenon. the global problem, we've identified client and the investigation such as india as a 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 don't think, i think we can continue to claim that it's an exception. given the scale of the revelations that have come to light metalli's auto. you were one of those whose phone was targeted. how did you feel when you found out? indeed, 1st i would like to fact receive to national and the security nap died, which who contacted me or whether you asked me to submit my phone to the investigation. and i was lucky this time actually, i mean there was a bomber 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 journalist, german hoshevely, oh, terribly eggs are very many and we had we heard for the 1st

time about and so when did i need, who is an ex 9 in canada through citizen and thank you for asking us to the fact that his phone was patched and i took my own precaution, and i paid a lot of money to protect my phone, but there were no guarantees. i even went on a course and 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 of longer ability. that is that cheating up intrusion, there's anger. but also i would actually lucky that 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 dishes is active. and they were all in one way or another. and from the open messages that we'd get on twitter to main hacking which is done in secret. and we had over the last of the year, especially after the murder of the black list on twitter and one of the people who propagated. this is nobody but the body was named in the united nation report and the report on the merger, partial g as one of the people heavily involved in this. he was also involved

in the torture of the 7 years in prison for 3 years. so he op, that's out, be a partnership 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 people who shouldn't be enemies. and we like to twitters, to that we acted all the social media outlets the child duration uses. and this was an open read cold for people to write name in twitter. that should be element. yes. clearly is a process that was put in place. i want to move on to, to professor dba, 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 contained malware from and so 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, and 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 a 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 it at 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 have 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 government 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, emmanuel 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 caught out, not on the scale but being, find themselves in the situation. tend to use the same argument as i understand it . that on stealers 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 do several live in 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 in 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 there on spying, a need dropping technology. and this is done under strict rule and

democracy. but in a country like savvy ravia, and also israel injury and licenses. and to show this technology to a dictatorship in the region and have claimed that this is the only democracy in the world. and therefore the responsibility chance is the headquarters off. and so which happens to be in the state of israel and also the child as a dictatorship that uses this, that knology. again, i'm academic center. remo, 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 and how 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 are least, or 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 their privacy against this type of spyware and his answer was. busy busy what can people do to protect themselves from nuclear weapons?

and, you know, he has a good point because they, spyware is a weapon. it is a weapon against freedom of the press. it's a weapon against freedom of expression, as a weapon against human rights. and that the initial breach to the right to privacy has a sort of domino effect on other violations of rights. you know, to talk equipment is used to target activists. john, this human life depended while it's very difficult to establish a link between the targeting of somebody with the spyware and then for example, the carry arrest or that. but it, by the series of questions about how the bible reduced and, and the real life consequences of even interceptions. and so it's not reasonable to expect that individuals have to face suspect individually. and really, governments need to step up and regulate this by way, industry, which is completely out of control. and now back to your question about the, the top schools that has been set up in israel. unfortunately,

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

i just like to say that, and we also have human rights responsibilities independent of states, obligation towards human rights. and any group has faith at several times, but it has the power to talk access to its system. we're seeking credible evidence that it's system to being misused. 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 that it states that it is completely capable of doing. natalie, 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 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 drive about 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 saturdays 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 pair, my conversations are best accessible through this malware and

therefore it is responsibility that i have in addition to my on security, i have to worry about my job. thank you very much indeed. and thanks to all the structure of the, our, him, a ronald, the vote, and my dolly of a sheet and thank you to for watching. you can see the program again any time by visiting our website, odyssey that 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 to bye for now. a

news news. news. news. news. coveted beyond the taken without hesitation, so forth and died for the power they find out a lot of new babies, which i did not think it's neglected. babies to death, people and power invent to gain exposes and questions. they used to be of our around the globe. on our lease, you mix traction. he's well and away at the all full snacks in the province of a boy. in northern argentina,

it is referred to as to why 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 the transformation of the public transport system. argentina has one of the biggest in the region would, and we would try to transform. i wanted a system, i didn't know what libya and she'll have a wrong 70 percent of the world's lithium research. the lift is in liquid ryan. we are located in full flat, like this one, thousands of liters of water are necessary to pump top the frying research to the surface. there is later on, distributed in evaporation pools. communities around this area are concerned that few extraction could complicate their access toward when freedom of the press is under threats. step outside the mainstream shift, the focus that pandemic has turned out to be

a handy little pre for the prime minister to clamp down on the press. so listening posts on a jazz eda besieged by violent crime and drugs confronted by racism and integration. 0 traces the history of 1st generation lebanese australians, exploring the conflict and their struggle for acceptance. once upon a time and punch bowls on al jazeera, i award winning programming from international. so make one quick. so it's right on the back side of the global discussion. what guarantee that would be the right to 65 life giving voice to the voice here in california, it almost everybody's a paycheck away from being on house program, but open your eyes, no toner, if you well today,

this is what the picture looks like. the, the world from a different perspective on out of here i care about healthy us engages with the rest of the world. we're really interested in taking you into a play. you might not visit otherwise and feel that you were there. ah, i'm getting fidel and all of the top stories on al jazeera, the pentagon is expressing alarm of the rapidly deteriorating security situation in afghanistan. and general mark milly says the taliban now controlled nearly half of the country's $400.00 class districts. all of this is of course happening as us troops pulling out, fighting between africa and government forces and the taliban is intensifying. it is 7 people were killed by shelling and the southern province of candle on wednesday. my car has more from washington d. c.