We All Are Persons of Interest

Why the Pegasus affair is not only about the journalists and activists?

All week long, the Pegasus Project, a collaboration between news agencies like the Washington Post, The Guardian, and the Amnesty International, has dominated the news cycles of several countries where many journalists, activists, opposition leaders, and political strategists have found themselves either in the list of potential targets or among the victims of the now infamous spying software.

Pegasus is a tool for targeted surveillance - the practice of monitoring the behavior of a selected group of people, the so called persons of interest. And some governments have been using this kind of personal surveillance of journalists and activists to weaken the force of the civil society which acts as a check on the executive’s excess power.

But Pegasus costs a fortune. And all the victims on whom Pegasus was used, they are all kind of the high-value target, which most of us aren’t. Then why should we care? While browsing the web, or browsing social media, you are followed by bots and trackers. They monitor your web activity, what links you click on, what kind of content you engage with etc. And search engines like Google, or social media platforms like Facebook or TikTok, use that information on your online behavior to tailor ads for you - targeted advertising, which means you’ll be shown ads of products and services you are most likely to buy. So we are all persons of interest now.

Consumers are to be persuaded, criminals and terrorists are to be monitored, dissidents are to be silenced, public opinion is to be manipulated, and elections are to be won. And for that persuasion and monitoring to take place, the manipulators need access to your contacts, your voice recorder, your location data, and your browsing history.

The industry of surveillance - it doesn’t matter if it provides its tools to the corporate or the state - will continue to survive, and some will argue, thrive. The only solution, though, is to take back your privacy. Your privacy which is also fundamental to the functioning of a democratic polity, with checks and balances to curb the excesses of both the big tech and the big brother.