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.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

We turn now to a film that looks at the increasing use of spyware targeting journalists, human rights advocates, dissidents across Western democracies and around the world. The HBO original documentary Surveilled, which is airing tonight on HBO at 9 p.m., follows Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow, who uncovers how Pegasus and other surveillance programs are threatening democracy across the globe. This is the film’s trailer.

RONAN FARROW: Why should people around the world care about the hacking that you’re documenting here?

ELIES CAMPO: These cases affect 450 million people. It’s a violation of their rights.

CLAUDIU DAN GHEORGHE: What we ended up finding was actually the tip of the iceberg.

RONAN FARROW: Spyware is this powerful surveillance tool. Big spyware companies say they sell this tech only to governments. But this multibillion-dollar industry is mostly unregulated. The most advanced spyware can turn your smartphone into a spy in your pocket. It can copy everything and record you without you ever knowing, and then just disappear without a trace.

This company, NSO Group, makes Pegasus, advanced spyware reportedly deployed in at least 45 countries, with allegations it’s being used to target journalists, human rights activists and political dissidents.

What’s the most objectionable thing that you saw in your time at the company?

NSO GROUP WHISTLEBLOWER: One of the moral problems that I had was the journalist murder.

RONAN FARROW: Should people be concerned?

NSO GROUP WHISTLEBLOWER: Definitely, yes.

RONAN FARROW: Does NSO know that some of its customers are abusing this technology?

REP. JIM HIMES: This tool could fall into the hands of the Iranians, the North Koreans, the Chinese. We need our experts to know what is out there.

ELIES CAMPO: They targeted my family. My mom, she worked at the hospitals, so they had access to hundreds of data of patients all around the world.

RONAN FARROW: Do you think it’s headed down a path of more domestic impact?

NATHANIEL FICK: These technologies, any nefarious use that we can imagine, we’re probably going to see.

AMY GOODMAN: The trailer to the new HBO original film Surveilled, now streaming on Max, the film directed by Perri Peltz and Matthew O’Neill.

On Tuesday, Democracy Now!’s Juan González and I spoke with Matt O’Neill and Ronan Farrow, who produced the film. Ronan is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, his latest article headlined “The Technology the Trump Administration Could Use to Hack Your Phone.”

I began by reading to Ronan from a recent article in The Guardian that notes, “In 2017, while reporting on a story on Harvey Weinstein that would, along with a New York Times report, kick off the #MeToo movement, the investigative journalist Ronan Farrow found himself the target of covert surveillance. The efforts to suppress investigations into Weinstein’s history of sexual abuse, for which the Hollywood mogul paid the Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube, were mostly old-school,” unquote.

I asked Ronan Farrow to lay out what happened.

RONAN FARROW: Well, I got a firsthand view of the toolkit that powerful institutions and individuals can deploy when they’re trying to suppress reporting. And I saw it on a miniature scale, where one mogul did this, frankly, insane maneuver of retaining a private intelligence company that literally hired actors, former military and intelligence people from Israel, to play roles and insinuate themselves into individuals’ lives who were around the story. That included sources that I was working with, women who, as it turns out, had allegations of assault against Weinstein. It included journalists working on the story, including me.

And so, there was a two-pronged approach. There were people posing as people who wanted to talk to us, wanted to get close to us, and then there were also subcontractors who were hired to just do the traditional gumshoe work of staking people like me out. I had two guys outside of my apartment. And eventually I was able to get the contracts and all the signatures of the lawyers and prove that this operation was happening, and get sources inside this company, Black Cube, to describe what they were doing. And actually, one of the subcontractors that was following me around all the time, sometimes using some high-tech approaches, too — pinging my phone, getting my geolocation data so they could follow me to meetings — one of them became a source in the end. So, I wrote a book about this, Catch and Kill, and there’s a documentary series on that, if people are interested in more.

But I did, through that experience, through this relatively low-tech approach to surveillance, get a little picture of how personally devastating it can be to have your private interactions monitored in that way. In this case, there were real stakes, because I was talking to whistleblowers around this story who were risking everything and couldn’t be uncovered, if I wanted the story to go forward. And I also saw how unsafe it makes you feel. Surveillance of journalists — and, you know, this goes for surveillance of dissidents, it goes for surveillance of political opposition members that we see in the film and in the world now so often — is not just information gathering. Surveillance of this type is intimidation, and it shrinks the space for all kinds of expression in democracies.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, Ronan, from that relatively low-tech type of surveillance to what we’re confronting today and in recent years, how did then you decide to cover this aspect of........

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