Laurent richard is a paris based Award Winning documentary filmmaker who was named the 2018 european journalist of the year at the prix europa in berlin. Hes a founder of forbidden stories, a network of investigative journalists devoted to continuing the unfinished work of of murdered report reporters to ensure the work they died for is not buried with them. Is the author of numerous investigations into the lives of the tobacco industry, the excesses of the financial sector, and the clandestine actions of an aside in the cia since its creation, forbidden stories has received numerous awards, including a prestigious european press. Two george polk awards and an rss impact prize for the Pegasus Project published originally in 2021. Since rego is a french investigative journalist as editor of forbidden stories since 2019, she coordinated the Award WinningPegasus Projects and cartel project, an international of assassinated mexican journalists, before joining forbidden stories, she directed feature length documentaries for french television. She has reported from tanzania uzbekistan, lebanon, qatar and bangladesh and speaking with them this afternoon when at clemson is the Charles Eisendrath director of Wallace House of the night. Wallace fellowships for journalists and, the livingston awards for young journalists at the university of michigan. Shes a knight was along and came to the university from National Public radio, where she was senior director strategy and content initiatives developing and guiding projects across broadcast, digital and events. Her career in journalism, newspapers, magazines and audio across a range of platforms as a reporter, she was a washington based correspond and for the New York Times and newsweek written about politics, social issues and demographic prior to her domestic correspondent work, she was an International Correspondent for newsweek, based in hong kong. She covered the former british colonies, returned chinese rule. In 1997, she moved into Digital Strategy and leadership. In 2008, as founding managing editor of the website, the root. Com launched for the Washington Post company with Henry Louis Gates jr. Shes also the former director of content strategy at the pew center on states. Please join me in welcoming into your living rooms and Sandrine Rigaud, Laurent Richard and lynette clemetson. Thank john and thank you everyone for joining from your living rooms, from your offices for your lunch tables, wherever you are today. And this is such a pleasure to be able to talk with two people who i respect, admire and consider colleagues lauren rashad and, Sandrine Rigaud and before we get started, this book came on tuesday. You can order it now. A lot of i know have been waiting for the pub day for this. And so it is wonderful to be able to hold it in our hands and for me to be able to hold up here for you. Pegasus is how a spy in your pocket threatens the end of privacy, dignity and democracy. So very serious title and some exciting things that were going be talking about today. So john introduced us, but i do think because were journalists, we want to be transparent. I know laura and sandrine, forbidden stories as was created here am sitting at Wallace House here on in ann arbor and lauren was a 20 1617 night wallace fellow the very first sentence that became forbidden was crafted right here at my desk with with lauren and. And ive gotten to know as forbidden stories has grown. And as weve watched them win awards and save lives with work. So its such a pleasure to. Talk to you both today. Thank hearing it. Thank you. Its wonderful to be there connected to the what i was for for the rest of the life. Work so before we jump in, john said said it in the intro but i want to before we jump into pegasus, give people grounding in forbidden stories forbidden stories is an International Collaborative investigative News Organization that you created. Lauren finish the work of reporters who have been threatened, jailed or killed. Can you talk to us a little bit about how forbidden stories works . And just to give people some insight to scoop on the busy lives of journalists up until maybe 30 seconds before we started, you both were in a call with journalists around the world talking about something that youre working on now. And so the work of forbidden stories is urgent and involves countries around the world, which if you can just tell people about what one. Yeah. Why you created it. Yeah its true. Its correct. Say, there is always a kind of fusion in what we are. And basically the problem we are facing. And this we made, we are bringing forbidden stories. The problem is the killing of journalists and the solution we do have is continuing the work. Journalists assassinated under threat of jail and make sure people get access to those very crucial information. People have been killed and then once people, criminals would with start understanding that it doesnt make sense to kill reporters because you would have 17 other reporters who will continue the work will expose what you wanted to. Id then maybe we will start dissuading those brains to think about should we kill someone if we want to silence the stories, maybe if we kill that person, maybe we will expose much more than expected what we wanted initially to silence. So thats the dna of forbidden stories. Its its based on something that we believe strongly. Its collateral journalism. Its its its another kind of parody. Its we have been trained to become lone wolves people to we have been trained to not share the awards when we arrive on the stage, we have been trained to react to to work very as very alone in all this process of, making, writing of stories. And so we are doing that. We are questioning the work of of assassinated of the threat of treating reporters in a collaborative way. And then we have publishing all of that in the same time. And we do work with six News Organization, 150 reporters. We start years ago, we did several, including the pegasus, which was slightly different than the original mission because there were this story and this investigation we didnt start with with a crime against committed against a reporter, but it starts with a leak that. We were having access to a leak that were contained in 50,000 phone numbers of people around the planet potentially targeted by a spyware called pegasus and tied to the death of at least one journalist. If not, yeah. Im of the leak. Yeah, yeah. Maybe something you want to tell more that. Yeah as laurel said, the Pegasus Project starts with a leak of 50,000 phone numbers that were potentially targeted by pegasus and what was interesting when we started on those numbers and work was huge because we just had numbers. We didnt any names attached to to those numbers. So the first our first work as journalists was to try to find out who who potentially targeted and mean it took us weeks. We did that with the help of great tech experts from Amnesty International security lab claudio and unca. Are described in the book, but it took us months to know and to gather enough to have an idea of the profile of the targets. And we discovered that many dozens and actually hundreds. We discovered quite quickly of of those people on the list were, journalists, journalists working in very complicated countries, journalists and mexico, journalists in morocco a journalist in azerbaijan, lahore found the name of a friend of his candidates, moldova. We found we found names of journalists in in. And we also found the name of a of a journalist who who was killed a few days after appearing on the list. Of course, we cannot deduce from that. He was, a mexican journalist, that he was fired on to to be murdered. But this raised a number of question and we also had the case of of many relatives, jamal khashoggi, appearing on the list. And that was quite big because we what we discovered working on on huge list was that the fiancee and the wife of jamal khashoggi, khashoggi had been spied on before and after his death and that spying might have led probably to or at least its a its the hypothesis that the information the saudis found in the phone of those two women might have led to twist. So this is this, of course, those are very important stories we published with all our partners on july 20 in july 2021. And i want to just just do a little tone setting. I we we have several journalists, several night. Wallace fellows in joining us. And i want to share and lauren youll be very proud of me. I keep these on my desk all the time. So from this, somebody came into my yesterday from a film crew and i and i sent him out with three of these to put on his camera boxes. So these are now making their way around the world with one more person. But killing the journalist wont kill the story. And i think that this is important and is tied to the work of pegasus because when we you know, when you were crafting the idea for what forbidden stories would become, it was about sort of synthesizing the journalist the danger to journalist in a way that people could understand and and what the mission of your organization is, which is not a human rights organization. Its not a competency. Its protecting journalism by doing journalism. And and, you know, this thing which you mentioned that people often think they can squash a story or incriminating information about themselves, their their governments by killing the journalists and forbidden stories was a brilliant idea because youre saying to people, okay, well, if you kill that journalist, theyve already stored their information with us. And we will coordinate to have 18 other journalists in or 50 other journalists and 18 countries continue. And the story will be bigger, more people will know about your corruption. And so with pegasus, you know, i think when it when the story broke, it was so and i just want to out to people that the introduction for the book is written by Rachel Maddow and and theres something that she has the intro that i just want to read because think tonally it will set the the environment for people who just approaching this topic of Pegasus Software fresh so these Rachel Maddow his words not mine where is your phone now that little device in your pocket likely operate as your personal calendar, your map and atlas your post office, your telephone, your scratch pad, your camera, basically as your trusted matthew smith, a professor of moral and political philosophy, wrote in 2016, that a mobile phone is, quote, an extension of the mind, there is simply principal distinction between processes occurring in the midi glob in your cranium and. The processes occurring in the little silicon, metal and glass block that is your iphone, the Solid State Drive storing photos in the phone are your memories in the same way that certain groups neurons storing images in your brain are your memories. Our minds extend beyond our heads and into our phones. Professor smith was making the case back then for a zone of privacy that extended to our mobile phone. If the state has no right to access the thoughts our head, why should it have right to access the pieces of . Our thoughts that we keep in our mobile phone . And i think thats such a powerful to think about, to get people sort of thinking about what you stumbled on this. A leak that included 50,000 numbers all the world tied to multiple governments, multiple state actors. And and what is i mean i think when i first read the story, when it broke theres a tendency to think, well, its terrible that these information is breached, but theyre in faraway places. When you think about as 50,000 numbers all over world, i think it becomes quite clear that this could be any us at any time. So can you talk about. When you first tell the story of how you first got the leak and how you realized that this was a huge, huge story . We were having access to that leak. So with both of organizations, forbidden stories and Amnesty International were granted access to that leak. And the day were summoned in. And i were starting understanding what was happening in front in front of eyes, watching, reading, thats list succession of phone numbers in many countries and at the same time understanding that those all those people were potentially by more than ten state Intelligence Units who were potentially or severely in head of state lawyers, human rights journalists, your neighbors, myself, everybody. Its the scale is was really scary for us. The scale just as scale and and the scale and the like. Okay we a lot of states using exactly the same spy world sold by one only one Company PrivateCompanies Selling something to many state. Officially the narrative is we sell that to catch the bad guys to catch the terrorists and we are not antispyware journalist we not that we are just germany so thats what we were signing on attorneys the Global Global mission of that spyware against people who were having something in common, whether it was a journalist in mexico, a human rights lawyer in london, or someone as in rwanda, there, political opponents in rwanda, for instance, they were both representing danger to the poor, danger the guy the to a dictatorial to a tyrant. We find that tool the spyware pegasus as magic magic toy to expose the terror and to track the people and to collect information in a very efficient way. So, sandrine, i, i read was great interest the company that developed pegasus, an israeli company, nso, when it marketed pegasus as a lot of it was sort of using fear, peoples fear to, to sort of perpetrate or share the what they saw as the virtues of. So there was so much about well, with this spyware law enforced, it can catch the activity of pedophiles before they hurt children. And who wouldnt want to stop pedophiles and was how they talked about the use of the spyware. But in fact, as lauren said, wasnt really being used in that way. And it was being used by government leaders to surveil people who were a threat, government power. So how did you see how did you see as you learned about, Pegasus Software . How did you come to understand what was for and who it was for . You mentioned . The nso company. What was interesting when we started working on nso is that the founders, nso shalev were you and marina are quite talkative people. Theyre sort of you is a businessman, he is not. And he was not in the spyware. At the beginning, he created many startup and hes a hes good seller, hes a very good seller. So he always pretended present nso as a as the the best company. The company was the best practices in that that sells spyware. So he explains. Many times doing interviews that pegasus was sold to government not only to fight terrorists, to fight criminals adored, to give the example of el chapo, which, according to him was arrested thanks to pegasus. So i mean, that was the narrative and he was giving to to everybody and what was interesting when we started on that list is the the scale of the misuse. We discovered there had been some cases that had been documented before the Pegasus Project on some. Yeah misuse or in some case of a journalist who was infected. We knew that cameron there is a very famous mexican journalist, had been infected by pegasus, but nobody realized. I think we published the Pegasus Project that the scale of the the lies of the of nso group. You were speaking the moment we realized that what we were dealing with was big. I remember then one of the way we we could discover who was behind the numbers was to cross check our numbers for numbers the numbers of our of our colleagues with the list to see if we could find people in that list very randomly and when lauren did and when i did that, we discovered we we were in touch physically with. People who had been probably spied on, lauren discovered, the name of this journalist from azerbaijan, been working on gadgets moldova. And i discovered the name of horik carrasco. Hes a journalist from proceso, mexican. And at the time i saw his name. We were actually in contact working on the cartel project, mexican journalist who were assassinated. We were following and pursuing the work and he did on the murder of the friend of of of his Regina Martinez and we basically discovered that we were in touch on the very sensitive investigation with somebody who might have been spied on. So at that moment, you really realize how big this is, how close is to you and that to touching something very dangerous. Yeah. And how so how did you in those moments when you realized that that lauren you with khadija and sandrine you with her. Hey that you had been exposed to this Pegasus Software through your connections what did it make you feel about the phone, your hand that you were using to communicate with all of these journalists . The world on the most sensitive of stories, the thing is that we decided to use any more funds to investigate for this specific investigation, and we can not reveal what of devices we were using, but we had to be. So we were able for Amnesty International security secrets in our they set up some protocols, highly encrypted to a platform devices that we can not talk about. So we can be safe and in the meantime, coordinate a large group of journalists, aide to journalists from all around the world, but true that the only thing you dont want is to be the next on the list. If you if we were in fact that would have been the end of the project. The danger for sources for team members, for so for source protection reasons for the the sake of the project, we need to to set up and to i extremely highly encrypted media to to communicate. The other thing i wanted to say is when we were frequently in that situation, we were telling some people,