Here are some extracts from the current book I’ve begun reading about the spread of an evolved spyware application, Pegasus. The authors describe earlier spyware consequences and now believe each and every one of us who has a phone is going to be losing their democratic rights if we don’t act in time to prevent the looming threat. This book was published in 2021. I have only now come across it. I hope I am in a minority who have not found it earlier.
The authors provide some history of Spyware in recent historic context, such as:
Amesys, a unit of French technology firm Bull SA, installed a monitoring center for Gadhafi….
that allowed his agents to monitor the emails, chats, and messages of anybody in Libya. The Gadhafi regime was able to identify and track the dictator’s many political opponents almost at will. “Whereas many Internet interception systems carry out basic filtering on IP addresses and extract only those communications from the global flow (Lawful Interception),” read an Amesys-produced poster hanging in the office in Tripoli, “EAGLE Interception system analyzes and stores all the communications from the monitored link (Massive Interception).”
Book, ‘Pegasus’, Laurent Richard, Sandrine Rigaud
Consequences:
According to the testimony of several detainees in a French court in 2013, Gadhafi’s interrogators were able to quote back to them—verbatim—their emails, SMS exchanges, Facebook threads, chat-room conversations, even private phone conversations. The security agents usually demanded from their captives the identities behind the various user names they had been communicating with online or on the phone. If threats, beatings, electric shock, and other torture weren’t enough to convince the detainees to reveal the names of otherwise anonymous comrades, Gadhafi’s agents would ship them off to prison. Threats and beatings continued there, along with brief field trips to a courtyard to witness the executions of other prisoners. When these revelations started to come out in France, Bull SA made the prudent business move. They simply off-loaded the technology that ran the Eagle system to another French company, Nexa Technologies—which continued to make it available on the open market. Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who seized power following the chaos of the Arab Spring, became one of the French cyberweapon’s most enthusiastic end users. (The surveillance system was reported to be a $12 million gift from al-Sisi’s friends in the United Arab Emirates.) “The grave human rights violations committed to this day by the various branches of the [Egyptian] security services include arbitrary mass ararrests, with the incarceration of at least 60,000 political prisoners since 2013; extrajudicial executions; enforced disappearances . . . and the systematic use of torture,” the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights had noted in a recent report, Egypt: A Repression Made in France. “This modus operandi of the security forces, aimed at eliminating all possibility of dissent, has become everyday reality for all Egyptians, and it specifically targets political opponents and civil society: members of political parties, the Muslim Brotherhood and their supporters, activists in revolutionary movements and of all stripes, human rights defenders, lawyers, journalists, writers, researchers, in addiaddition to LGBTQ people or those perceived as such.” The Bull/Amesys/Nexa axis was hardly alone in selling spyware systems to questionable regimes—regimes that had nevertheless been designated by France as “a bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism,” according to the report. “The enormous increase of arms sales beginning in 2013 and al-Sisi’s arrival in power in Egypt in 2014 have proven profitable for at least eight French companies that have sold equipment—both conventional weapons and surveillance equipment—to Egypt.”
Book, ‘Pegasus,’Laurent Richard, Sandrine Rigaud
It is maybe helpful to remind yourself which French President was in power during these Spyware sales:
https://www.frenchlearner.com/culture/french-presidents
See headline : “French spyware bosses indicted for their role in the torture of innocents”
Let is not forget 2005 when democracy produced a win in Egypt, 2005:
Dunne: ’Very Dramatic’ Achievement for Muslim Brotherhood in Egyptian Parliamentary Elections
History tells us of the pain suffered over decades by North Africans such as Algerians when they fought for independence from French colonialism:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/7/5/algerias-road-to-independence-60-years-on
Thanks to covert licensing of spyware, thus allowing it to pass into the administrations of dictators, the thousands of would be magnificent contributors to their country have been silenced. For example:
borderslynn 
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