Spy fiction has been warning us about Pegasus for years

Consider, to begin with, the following scenario.

Saudi Arabia needs cyber-surveillance technology to monitor suspected terrorists. It sets up a data centre that employs mobile phone-hacking software from an Israeli company. Soon, the crown prince starts using this to keep tabs on his opponents as well as prominent journalists, fearing that he may be toppled by an Internet-based “hashtag uprising”.

A senior Israeli intelligence officer, anticipating that this would happen, had opposed the sale of spyware from the start. However, such concerns were overruled by the prime minister.

That is an episode from American author Daniel Silva’s 2019 thriller, The New Girl. The intelligence officer referred to is Gabriel Allon, protagonist of Silva’s series of novels, many of which have real-life resonance. As Silva writes in the novel’s foreword, “Elements of The New Girl are quite obviously inspired by events surrounding (Jamal) Khashoggi’s death. The rest occur only in the imaginary world inhabited by Gabriel Allon, his associates, and his enemies.”

He is hardly the only novelist to make use of such material. Take Israeli writer Dov Alfon, whose bestselling A Long Night in Paris was published in Hebrew in 2016, with an English translation in 2019. It’s a breathless thriller about French and Israeli security teams on the trail of a vanished tech executive, with Chinese commandos waiting in the wings.

Israel’s use of surveillance technology plays a large role in the book, as does paranoia over security issues, which leads to silicon chip-driven shenanigans. Alfon himself was an intelligence officer and former editor of Haaretz, currently one of the news outlets breaking stories about NSO’s Pegasus spyware.

In a recent interview, he said that though many spy novels tend to be written about human intelligence, “this is just a very small part of the espionage world these days”. He tries to portray contemporary cloak-and-dagger activities, with the tracking of events in real time via the latest technology.

With Edward Snowden’s revelations, it became even more clear that such access to personal data is almost a matter of routine for law-enforcement agencies. Enough to make John le Carré’s Smiley gaze contemplatively into his late-night whisky and Ian Fleming’s James Bond demand that his martinis be both shaken and stirred.

At one time, spy writers feared that the collapse of the Soviet Union meant the drying up of interesting material for their books. Now, they’re gamely making use of these new tricks of the trade, sometimes coming up with prescient results.

Writer and former BBC China correspondent Adam Brookes agrees with Alfon when he says, “A lot of spying is now done behind a computer keyboard”. However, “it has not pushed completely out of the limelight the need for human spies”.

His 2014 Night Heron is an attempt to imagine spycraft today. The novel deals with the culture of mass surveillance in China and the theft of a software key that will give the West information about the country’s missile systems. As one reviewer said at the time, it updates Eisenhower’s 1961 warning about the military-industrial complex with a new one: an emerging espionage-industrial complex.

Others such as Mick Herron, author of the Slough House series about disgraced MI5 operatives, take the opposite tack. He’s written about software replacing human agency as the cornerstone of intelligence, but tends to avoid this in his books. Though he says that “most espionage is about covert surveillance…listening in to mobile telephones”, he admits he has no interest in, and no knowledge of, how this is done.

It’s not just espionage, though: so many other thrillers have routinely featured digital dirty tricks. Lisbeth Salander, who first appeared in 2006’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was famously suspicious of using mobile phones without taking precautions, as well as proficient in hacking into banks and other places. In hindsight, her suspicions seem quite justified.

Then again, there have been several political thrillers over the years in which hacking, among other digital dangers, is par for the course. Tom Clancy’s 2012 Threat Vector, for instance, features compromised laptop cameras and phone trackers; Gerald Seymour’s 2018 A Damned Serious Business has dodgy exploits involving Russian thefts of personal information and electoral interference; and in Peter Hanington’s just-released A Cursed Place, a shady cyber-corporation surveils and predicts human behaviour for covert actions.

Back in the real world, whether action is taken against Israel’s NSO or not, the genie is out of the bottle. As the Washington Post’s recent editorial put it: “NSO isn’t alone, and neither is Israel. The private spyware industry is thriving, largely unrestrained.”

In her impassioned Privacy is Power, Oxford professor Carissa Véliz says: “Widespread surveillance is incompatible with free, democratic, and liberal societies in which human rights are respected. It has to go.” Unfortunately, it seems likely that more versions of Pegasus will spring up, some crude, others sophisticated.

Welcome to a brave new world, where liberties are under more threat than ever before. To understand its contours, one should probably move away from thrillers and turn to dystopian fiction instead.