The executive bugged? Numbers of President Emmanuel Macron and members of the government are on a list of potential targets for the Pegasus software, used by some states to spy on personalities, Laurent Richard, director of the Forbidden Stories organization, said on Tuesday, confirming information from the
World.
The daily revealed Tuesday that these numbers, including that of former Prime Minister Edouard Philippe and 14 members of the government, appeared “in the list of numbers selected by a security service of the Moroccan state, user of the spyware Pegasus , for potential piracy ”.
“If the facts are true, they are obviously very serious”
“We found these phone numbers, but we were obviously unable to carry out a technical investigation on Emmanuel Macron’s phone” to check if he was infected by this software and therefore “that does not tell us if the president was really spied on, ”explained the director of Forbidden Stories, on the LCI news channel. But according to him, whether or not the president was spied on, that “shows in any case that there was an interest in doing so”.
“If the facts are true, they are obviously very serious. All the light will be shed on these press revelations ”, reacted the presidency, questioned by AFP to know if the head of state had been“ potentially spied on ”via Pegasus.
Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International have obtained a list of 50,000 phone numbers selected by NSO clients since 2016 for potential surveillance and shared it with a consortium of 17 media outlets that revealed its existence on Sunday.