People are ‘sh*t-scared‘
For the people targeted by private intelligence work — including journalists, whistleblowers and dissidents — the activity can be life-altering. POLITICO spoke to two targets who said that surveillance, hacking and intimidation by such outfits had hit their finances, wellbeing and personal safety.
In one case, contractors working for a private intelligence company misrepresented themselves to the victim’s bank to obtain confidential information, filmed him inside his house, and then paid someone to access his phone.
Yet many of the targets simply will not have the money to push back against the intelligence firms. “That’s what they rely on … People that I have spoken to are absolutely shit-scared,” the first person said.
A second target said that after employing the “standard mechanisms” of threatening litigation for defamation, companies have “tools that they can deploy which are more sinister and can be quite scary.”
“[The company] appointed investigative agencies to surveil me, initially covertly and then overtly with vehicles and cameras placed outside my house,” the second victim said. “My family and I were also being followed.”
They said the company had paid hackers to break into their emails, passing on detailed information about the target’s life — allowing personalized phishing emails aimed at getting access to sensitive information. “When I discussed my case with a king’s counsel [senior U.K. lawyer], they said this was on par with the severity of the News of the World hacking, in terms of the scope and the scale of the invasion of privacy and the harassment involved,” the second target added, referencing a hacking scandal spanning the 1990s to 2011 involving a leading U.K. tabloid.