A Spy in Your Pocket? Ronan Farrow Exposes Secrets of High-Tech Spyware in New Film “Surveilled”

We look at the world of high-tech surveillance with Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow and filmmaker Matthew O’Neill. Their new HBO documentary Surveilled is now available for streaming. Farrow says he became interested in the topic after he was tracked by the Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube during his reporting on Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuse. Although Black Cube used a “relatively low-tech approach,” Farrow says the experience started him on a path to investigate more sophisticated methods of surveillance, including the powerful spyware Pegasus, which has been used against journalists and dissidents around the world. As part of the reporting for the documentary, Farrow traveled to Israel for a rare interview with a former employee of NSO Group, the Israeli software company that makes Pegasus. He warns that it’s not just “repressive governments” that abuse Pegasus and other surveillance technology, but also a growing number of democratic states like Greece, Poland and Spain. U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies under both the Biden and Trump administrations have also considered such spyware, although the extent to which these tools have been used is not fully known. “Surveillance technology has historically always been abused. Now the technology is more advanced and more frightening than ever, and more available than ever, so abuse is more possible,” says Farrow.