ment does not resolve. i don't think that 26000000000 is enough just to end the calendar. the united states has with addiction and overdose, but it could save a lot of lives as per canter. he feels the settlement now is better than going through more lengthy litigation. it's a victory because we have to balance the amount that these distributors and johnson johnson are willing to pay versus the amount of time that's going to be lost. so we can get these dollars for treatment. it might not be the end of the settlements. prosecutor said they are investigating other companies with involvement in opioids and are leaving the door open to filing more lawsuits. gabriel's ando al jazeera new york. ah, this is al jazeera and these are the headlines. thousands of people have rallied in december, but to show their support for the few pin governments troops fighting in

t grey. it comes with the confidence has widened to include neighboring horror and for regions. catherine silly has more form and a set of them. people started coming in here, mescal square. they rarely just ended about half an hour ago. so people say coming very early in the morning, he said, hearing them from all, tell us wrong fi, say t a. m. and as you said, thousands of them showed up. and the speakers really was castigating the to grand defense for to saying that they've been using children as soldiers and shields. they also accused the international community, including the international media of bias smith in the coverage in favor of the grand leadership. the pentagon is expressing alarm about the rapidly deteriorating security situation. in afghanistan, the senior most us general sense the taliban now controls the half of the countries, $400.00 plus districts. it coincides with the continued pullouts of american troops

. china has deployed its military to her non province. the central region is struggling with the worst flooding and living memory. troops of birth them to reduce the risk of more floods. at least 33 people have been killed. south korea has hit another daily record for its number of negro virus cases, more than 1800. the more contagious delta variances feeling the search. the latest numbers include 270 sailors who were phone home from an anti piracy mission abroad . authorities and i considering expanding restrictions in so and it's neighboring regions. it's one day until the start of the summer olympics in till q and organized to say to more athletes that they haven't picked village have tested positive for covert 19. they're among 12 cases, links to the games announced on thursday. bring the total $287.00. well that's your

up to date fe withers here on al jazeera. then use continues after inside story, which is next. after a one year delay the tokyo and then picks off, trying to decide growing opposition by running cost in japan. thousands of athletes will compete in empty stadium amid the corona, virus pandemic. audi 0 will be inside the bubble to bring them later games like no other it was meant to fight terrorism and crime, but many governments ended up using peg. this is 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, ah,

hello, welcome to the program. i'm rob madison. 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, and someone is really spyware, company called and s o group. thanks to evidence collected by the parents based n 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 as a group denies any longer and says that report is full of wrong assumptions. you know, the phone numbers of 14 heads a status center being targeted for potential surveillance. the include pakistan's

prime minister in non con, south african president said from oppose and the french president emanuel mac chrome. lamond newspaper says, mccombs phone number is on the list selected by morocco's intelligence service for potential cyber spying. if the allegations approved true, the president stuff 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 are set 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 want to, you know, 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 honors 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 but a dog may have been targeted for president in the ricky opinion, yet it was in power. and india is opposition. parties of accused prime minister, not in ramadi of compromising national security, they're 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,

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 the 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 problem is. and really that's an ludicrous claim that byler use only in quick climb terrorism related investigations. if it's absurd as investigation shows, was there any particular pattern that started to emerge in terms of the types of people that were being charged as well as this investigation show? it's really not just criminals and terrorists who've been targeted by where we have germany. we have people that we have lawyers, 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 a few clients that are using the technology. this is really a global phenomenon, the global problem identified client and the investigation such as india as

a by john marco and others who b, y where the 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 massive scale of the revelations that have come to life without 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 wasn't any bunger abilities. i always expected this child division to hack my phone. and they tried in 2014 to have my twitter account and they

were successful. but after 2018 and the murder of journalist jamal o, terribly eggs are very many and we had we heard for the 1st time about. and so when did i need, who is an 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 protect 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 and 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 as child who was 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 shouted 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 enemy ages. and we like to twitter so that we adopted 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 really clear with the 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 coffee 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 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 uncover massive widespread abuses in mexico. and so as pegasus system targeting journalist 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 governments 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 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, emmanuel microns phone targeted. so the time is come for everyone to realize this is a major global security issue. it's not just a human rights issue or not. and let me ask you this companies like and so in the past who have been caught, 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 the pass them on to is not our responsibility. is that a reasonable argument? good? does there 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 for 6 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 governments. so there shouldn't be a new treaty that actually regulate the show off this kind often. at the other problem is the privatization of security. 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 saudi arabia and also israel, injury and licenses. and to show this technology to a dictatorship in the region and have claimed that it 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 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 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 type of spyware and unwittingly. 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 suppressed west. and again, freedom of expression is a weapon against human rights. and that the initial breach to the right to privacy haven't put a domino effect on other violations of rights. you know, to time is used to target activists, journalists, human life defenders. 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 raises serious questions about how the, why were reduced the real life consequences of even interception. and so it's not reasonable to expect that individuals have to face up 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 and meaningful change. for years. we've been greater transparency from, from state and company than we've received. 60 says to do with national security, corporate secrecy, and others. what we need is a regulatory system, the actual t that can prevent, we've unscrupulous taxes from selling the sac of equipment. and we mentioned the call from oratory and embassy international support. but also there is a responsibility that and israeli government, it's important to remember human 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 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 group has faith at several time, but it has the power to access to its system. were received, credible evidence, but it's being diffused again. this investigation provide an abundance of evidence to show that it systems being abused, left right and center. and so will actually take action, but it states that it is completely capable of doing mckyrie. let me just ask you finally because we have a little bit of time left 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 ben excessive as through 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 r, 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, obviously 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

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a so called terrorist attack. his mother retaliated with love, speaking out against intolerance and alienation. she travels the world with the result of a grieving mother who loved her son, but adopted a generation latifah, witness documentary on al jazeera. ah . the pentagon sounds the alarm master. the televisions we can gain, while us troops finalized their withdrawal from of cam stone. i am hello hey, dina, this is al jazeera life and doha also coming up thousands of people gather in the

field in capital to show their support for government troops fighting into trying to stop the contagion.