The FBI Unwittingly Investigates Itself!

In April of this year, the FBI began an investigation to determine who was using illegal software to spy from within the United States on persons in Mexico.

The software was illegal because its Israeli manufacturer, a company called NSO, had previously crafted other software for the FBI, which President Joseph Biden had put on a Department of Commerce blacklist. Stated differently, because NSO manufactured software that enabled the government to violate the Fourth Amendment, all NSO-manufactured products are prohibited from use in the U.S.

Yet, somehow NSO had bypassed the federal embargo on its products and someone was using at least one of those products unlawfully.

The FBI investigation determined that the user of the illegal software was: THE FBI ITSELF.

Here is the backstory.

During the Trump administration, the FBI paid $5 million to NSO for a license to use its “zero-click” surveillance software called Pegasus. Zero-click is software that can download the contents of a target’s computer or mobile device without the need for tricking the target into clicking on it. The FBI operated the software from a warehouse in New Jersey leased by its customer, the American importer of the software.

Before revealing any of this to the two congressional intelligence committees to which the FBI reports, it experimented with the software. The experiments apparently consisted of testing Pegasus by spying – illegally and unconstitutionally, since no judicially issued search warrant had authorized the use of Pegasus – on unwitting Americans by downloading their personal data from their devices. The FBI later claimed that these experiments were harmless, as it never used the downloaded data.

When congressional investigators learned of these experiments, the Senate Intelligence Committee summoned FBI Director Christopher Wray to testify in secret about the acquisition and use of Pegasus, and he did so in December 2021. He told the senators that the FBI only purchased Pegasus “to be able to figure out how bad guys could use it.” Is that even believable?