The Mexican president said he told Ally not to worry about being spied on

The Mexican president admitted on Tuesday that he had been informed that his top human rights official was being spied on, but he told the official not to worry about it.

The admission comes a day after The New York Times revealed that Alejandro Encinas, the Mexican government’s secretary of state for human rights, was hacked by the world’s most notorious spyware while investigating abuses by the country’s military.

“He told me about it and I told him not to give it any importance, because it was not the intention to spy on anyone,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said after being asked about the report by The Times at his regular morning press conference on Tuesday. .

Mr López Obrador, who took office in 2018, vowed to end the “illegal” and “immoral” surveillance of the past and has said his government is not spying on anyone.

Mr Encinas was repeatedly targeted by the spyware known as Pegasus, as recently as last year, The Times reported. The cyber attacks on Mr. Encinas were confirmed by four people who spoke to him about the espionage and by an independent forensic analysis conducted by Citizen Lab, a watchdog group based at the University of Toronto.

Pegasus can infiltrate cell phones without leaving any trace of intrusion and extract every piece of data: every text message, every email, every photo. The system can even watch people through the phone’s camera and listen to them through the microphone.

The Israeli-made spy tool has infected thousands of mobile phones around the world and is only allowed to be sold to government agencies.

There’s no definitive proof of who was behind Mr. Encinas’ phone hacks, but in Mexico, the only entity with access to Pegasus is the military, according to five people familiar with the contracts for the spyware.

Mr Encinas leads the government’s truth commission into the 2014 disappearance of 43 students, one of the worst human rights violations in the country’s recent history. He and his team have accused the military of playing a role in the mass kidnapping of the students.

This is the first time there has been a publicly confirmed case of Pegasus spying on such a senior member of a government in Mexico, let alone one so close to the president.

When asked if the government would investigate the surveillance of Mr. Encinas, who has been Mr. López Obrador’s friend and ally for decades, the president said: “No, we are not spying.”

Several rights groups condemned Mr López Obrador’s comments.

“We regret that the president is minimizing the espionage conducted by his administration,” tweeted Centro Prodh, a human rights organization whose employees were spied on alongside Pegasus last year.

A group of independent experts conducting an investigation into the disappearance of the 43 students called on the Attorney General’s office to investigate the cyber-attacks against Mr Encinas, calling them “acts that violate the right to liberty and privacy”.

Under former President Enrique Peña Nieto, there were several Pegasus machines in Mexico that were controlled by the Attorney General’s office, the country’s spy agency, and the military.

But by 2019, all Pegasus systems in the country had been disconnected except the one run by the military, according to four people familiar with the contracts signed in Mexico.

After the Biden administration blacklisted the spyware manufacturer, NSO Group, in 2021, Israel’s Defense Ministry said it would take steps to prevent the system from being used for anything other than fighting serious threats. crime and terrorism.

The Department of Defense subsequently ordered several countries to detach from Pegasus, but did not cancel the Mexican Army’s permit and later extended it. A ministry spokesperson declined to comment.

NSO Group has opened an investigation into Pegasus’ reported abuses in Mexico, according to a person familiar with the company’s compliance protocols.

It is unclear how such an investigation would affect the fate of the spyware in Mexico, where Pegasus has been used against human rights defenders and journalists for years without any accountability.

Emiliano Rodriguez Mega contributed reporting from Mexico City.