Chasing Shadows

"In this real-life espionage thriller, cyber security expert Ronald Deibert uncovers the unseemly marketplace for high-tech surveillance, professional disinformation, and computerized malfeasance and reveals how his team of digital sleuths at the Citizen Lab have lifted the lid on dozens of spy cases targeting innocent citizens around the world. He recounts how the Lab exposed the world's pre-eminent cyber-mercenary firm, Israel-based NSO Group-the creators of the phone-hacking marvel Pegasus-in a series of human rights abuses, from domestic spying scandals in Spain, Poland, Hungary, and Greece to its implication in the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. Today, NSO Group, once valued at over a billion dollars, faces plummeting worth and an irretrievably tarnished reputation. Chasing Shadows provides a front-row seat to a dark underworld of digital espionage, sabotage, and subversion where autocrats and dictators peer into their targets' lives with the mere press of a button, spreading their tentacles of authoritarianism through a digital ecosystem that is insecure, invasive by design, poorly regulated, and prone to abuse. The brave activists, opposition figures, and journalists who dare to advocate for basic political rights and freedoms are hounded, arrested, tortured, and sometimes murdered."--