In Surveilled (now streaming on Max), celeb journalist Ronan Farrow investigates how governments use powerful spyware to hack phones and keep tabs on people. The cynical among us won’t be surprised to hear this. But that cynicism is further fortified by Farrow’s discovery that it’s not just fascist despots enacting this breach of privacy and civil liberties – democratic governments are using the software to monitor their own citizens, among them political dissidents and journalists. Farrow grew interested in the topic after his high-profile exposes of Harvey Weinstein and Leslie Moonves’ resulted in him being surveilled by private investigators who used his phone to track him. Farrow has since published multiple pieces in The New Yorker about this troubling technology, with his 2022 story headlined “How Democracies Spy on Their Citizens” forming the basis of this eye-opening hour-long documentary.
SURVEILLED: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: The NSO Group is a cyberintelligence organization based in Israel, and infamous for its software dubbed Pegasus, which allows users remote access to smartphones. The company’s only customers are governments, and both parties claim Pegasus is used solely to combat organized crime and terrorism. The software is credited for being a key component in the arrest of infamous Mexican cartel lord El Chapo – but it also has been linked with the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi government agents. Pegasus exploits code loopholes in various apps, most famously WhatsApp, which scrambled to patch its security vulnerabilities to combat the spyware, and subsequently sued NSO. The most distressing thing about Pegasus? It can worm its way into phones and not only access its data – photos, web history, etc. – but record audio and video without the user even being aware of it.
The documentary follows Farrow throughout 2021 and 2022 as he travels from continent to continent investigating this shady activity. Scrutiny on NSO in the wake of its very public controversies found the company adopting a new philosophy of “transparency,” which meant Farrow was allowed to visit its lavish Tel Aviv headquarters to interview various employees – under the watchful eye of its PR rep, of course. The company opened the doors to the press, “up to a point,” Farrow narrates. He walked away with a variety of assertions that NSO’s vetting process for assuring its government clients use Pegasus responsibly is tight. Take our word for it is the takeaway. Trust us.
Of course, Farrow distrusts such assurances and digs deeper. He finds a former NSO employee willing to dish on the company’s questionable ethics as long as his identity remains anonymous. He travels to Toronto, where activists at a group known as Citizen Lab have developed a means of testing phones for traces of Pegasus activity. Farrow then follows that thread to Spain, specifically Barcelona, where Citizen Lab investigator Elies Campo learned that the democratic government has been using Pegasus to spy on activists, journalists and politicians supporting a separatist movement in Catalan. From there, Farrow returns to the U.S. to ask politicians what they’re doing to combat such surveillance tactics, and if they’re using them in any capacity. The answer is complicated of course, but it’s also a big fat yes, although entirely within the civil liberties of the citizenry. Farrow’s takeaway? Take our word for it. Trust us.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Kill Chain, The Swamp, After Truth… all docs, like Surveilled, that we wish didn’t have to exist.
Performance Worth Watching: Campo is an underappreciated hero of the movement to combat Pegasus, at great personal sacrifice – we learn that the Spanish government hacked his family members’ phones to keep tabs on him.
Memorable Dialogue: Farrow asks Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes if the U.S. government uses Pegasus. The politician says yes, but only so the FBI can be fully informed about how it works so they can better combat it: “The notion that, for the first time in our history, we’re gonna say we’re gonna let all the bad guys have technology that we’re not going to use – that’s a novel concept. And when you really think it through, a little bit of a scary concept.”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: “A little bit of a scary concept.” Understatement of the year. Another disconcerting truth Farrow underscores in Surveilled? “You can’t put the tech genie back in the bottle,” a U.S. government official says. In other words, once Pegasus is out there flying around, it can’t be eradicated. Now, if you’re wondering what kind of grim, hopeless conclusion Farrow reaches by the end of the doc, well, here it is: “Our only path toward privacy might be living without our phones.” Loll that notion around in your brain, parse it critically with all the even-handed logic and reason you can muster, consider the context of life in America (and other countries wrangling with political instability, of course) and the conclusion you’ll reach is pithy and obvious: We’re doomed.
Sorry to be a bummer. Just reflecting the tone and message of this documentary. But hey, at least we’re better informed about things, right? It’s always better to know things than not know things, I keep telling myself, not sure if I’m lying to myself at least a little bit, and realizing that this is always the silver lining one paints atop bad news. We do get some glimpses into the diligence of serious investigative journalism as we watch Farrow poke and prod and dig and ask difficult questions. It’s not his responsibility to spin things positive or make us feel better. He doesn’t offer a viable solution to the problem of state-sponsored citizen surveillance; let’s face it, asking billions of people to smash their phones with a peen hammer is like asking a crocodile to please let go of your leg, because ow, that hurts. We’re too dependent on the tech, and many of us are all too willing to look the other way, or compromise our civil liberties for the sake of convenience, or be complicit in that look all you want because I never do anything wrong sense.
These notions bubble up during the course of Surveilled, alongside a quieter subtextual assertion that we shouldn’t expect allegedly democratic governments to do the right thing for the sake of the greater good, the U.S. included. Consider the words Rep. Himes uses here: “the bad guys.” What a relative term. The U.S. government is certainly considered to be “the bad guys” in other parts of the world, and maybe even within its own borders. Also not particularly reassuring: The Pegasus ordeal puts massive tech conglomerates like Apple and Microsoft on the frontlines of the battle against NSO, since their products are being exploited for nefarious means; on one hand, Big Tech has lots of money and sharklike lawyers at their disposable, but on the other, we trust them as much as the government to do the right thing. All kinds of troublesome information spills out of Surveilled, a documentary that offers reportage so vital, it’s no fun to watch whatsoever.
Our Call: For better or worse, we’re more informed about very bad things after watching Surveilled. STREAM IT, then go pour yourself 17 stiff drinks.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Read the full article here
