“And frankly, it scares us, too.”
The timing of the hacking coincided with a planned effort by advocacy organizations
and health researchers — including Dr. Barquera, Mr. Calvillo and Mr. Encarnación — to coordinate a mass media campaign to build support for doubling the soda tax, an effort that stalled in Mexico’s Congress in November.
All contracts with the federal government are done in accordance with the law.”
The NSO emails leaked to The Times referred to multimillion-dollar, continuing NSO Group contracts with several government agencies inside Mexico,
and the Mexican government has been an enthusiastic buyer of foreign spy tools.
The discovery of NSO’s spyware on the phones of Mexican nutrition policy makers, activists
and even government employees, like Dr. Barquera, raises new questions about whether NSO’s tools are being used to advance the soda industry’s commercial interests in Mexico.
It is not clear why any Mexican government agency would deploy the spyware to track those on the front lines of the fight to battle obesity in Mexico
— where diabetes was recently declared a national emergency — nor is it clear which Mexican government agency could be behind the surveillance.
The links sent to the men were laced with an invasive form of spyware developed by NSO Group, an Israeli cyberarms dealer
that sells its digital spy tools exclusively to governments and that has contracts with multiple agencies inside Mexico, according to company emails leaked to last year.
A subsequent forensics investigation by Citizen Lab of the messages sent to Mr. Calvillo, Dr. Barquera, Mr. Encarnación
and others confirmed that they were laced with NSO Group spyware.
