From inside a bomb-proof cellar, deep in the bowels of a villa outside the Dutch city of Eindhoven, a technician from the Forschungsstelle der Reichspost, the research department of the German post office, listened through his headphones to the dense stream of noise. United Kingdom Prime Minister Winston Churchill and United States President Franklin Roosevelt were speaking on their telephone, their conversation shielded by Bell Lab’s A3 scrambling system, which cycled through five ciphers every 12 seconds.
Even though no one outside the villa knew it, Nazi Germany’s Sicherheitsdienst intelligence service had defeated the A3’s encryption. The work of Kurt Vetterlein, the gifted forschungsstelle engineer, had given the Nazi leadership real-time access to the private conversations of their enemies’ top leaders.
This week, CitizenLab research revealed that Israel’s Pegasus software was deployed to target secret communications of the UK’s foreign ministry and Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s office. The espionage, CitizenLab says, likely involved the intelligence services of India, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Cyprus. For just a few million dollars, Pegasus gave countries powers that were monopolised by influential nations for much of modern history.
For many governments, including that of India, the Pegasus story is a compelling argument for placing cutting-edge technology at the heart of their intelligence services. The outcomes of the forschungsstelle’s feat, though,...
Read Full Story: https://theprint.in/opinion/security-code/pegasus-is-seducing-but-good-intelligence-isnt-just-tech-india-needs-more-than-software/923302/
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