On Wednesday, Mediterranea Saving Humans, an Italian nonprofit with the mission of rescuing immigrants who try to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Africa to Europe, said one of its founders was among the targets of a recent spyware campaign carried out against WhatsApp users.
In a press release, Mediterranea said WhatsApp notified its founder Luca Casarini last week that he had been targeted with spyware made by Paragon Solutions, an Israeli surveillance tech startup. On Friday, WhatsApp said it had disrupted an espionage campaign using Paragon spyware that targeted around 90 people.
At the time, the Meta-owned company said that among the targets there were journalists and members of civil society, without naming anyone. Since then some of the targets, including Casarini, have started to come forward.
The first person was Francesco Cancellato, the director of Fanpage.it, an Italian news website that has published investigations into organized crime and corruption. Last year the publication reported a multi-part documentary that showed some members of the youth wing of the party currently running the Italian government singing about fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, chanting Nazi slogans, and making racist remarks.
After Cancellato,Sweden-based activist Husam El Gomati also came forward. El Gomati has been critical of how Libya and Italy have collaborated to stop immigrants from crossing the Mediterranean. And now, Casarini is the latest person to have been notified by WhatsApp.
All three targets have one thing in common, their work, or that of their organizations, has been critical of the current Italian government, led by far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
“The activities of rescue at sea and assistance to people imprisoned in Libyan camps or deported to the desert are the focus of attention of the Italian secret services, in particular the AISE, which operates in Libya and Tunisia,” Mediterranea said in its press release. “Some questions arise: did the Italian government authorize such an operation? Do the Italian secret services use Paragon software?”
So far, the Italian government has not answered that question, nor has the government commented on Cancellato nor Casarini’s cases.
The Italian government, through its official press email address, as well as that of Fabrizio Alfano, the head of Meloni’s press office, have not responded to TechCrunch’s requests for comment and questions, which included whether Italy has purchased Paragon’s spyware.
Ynetnews, an Israeli news site, reported on Monday that Italy is a Paragon customer.
John Fleming, the executive chairman of Paragon’s U.S. subsidiary, did not respond to a request for comment on Casarini’s case, nor respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, Fleming told TechCrunch that Paragon, which was acquired by U.S. private equity fund AE Industrial in December, sells its products “to a select group of global democracies — principally, the United States and its allies.”
“[Paragon] requires that all users agree to terms and conditions that explicitly prohibit the illicit targeting of journalists and other civil society figures. We have a zero-tolerance policy against such targeting and will terminate our relationship with any customer that violates our terms of service,” Fleming said in the statement.
Fleming has not yet answered questions about Paragon, including whether the Italian government is a customer, and whether Paragon is investigating WhatsApp’s allegations and those of the targets that have come forward so far.
Mediterranea said that the Citizen Lab, a digital rights organization at the University of Toronto that has investigated spyware for more than a decade, are conducting an investigation on Casarini’s phone.
John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, confirmed to TechCrunch that they are actively investigating Paragon.
Scott-Railton warned that these cases are another reminder that the mercenary spyware industry, with companies such as NSO Group and Paragon, has been fueling abuses for years, even in democratic countries.
“If you sell surveillance tools it’s just a question of when the technology will be abused, not whether it will be,” said Scott-Railton.
“If you’re selling secret surveillance to democracies, you still have to be incredibly skeptical of your customers and assume the possibility that abuse is lurking around every corner. If you don’t, you’re choosing willful ignorance. To me, this points to something fundamental about the mercenary spyware model, which is: if you sell surveillance tools it’s just a question of when the technology will be abused, not whether it will be,” said Scott-Railton.
