Tag Archives: Book review

Arts, Books, Government, National Security, Society

Book Review: Pegasus

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: The reporting of the world’s most powerful spyware program should teach us that no one is safe from such systems. But will it?

EDWARD SNOWDEN’S infamous leaks in 2013 from the US National Security Agency triggered a global debate around state surveillance – but even he couldn’t quite believe the scale of the story described to him in the summer of 2021.

Whistle-blowers had handed French investigative journalists Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud a list of 50,000 mobile phone numbers. These belonged to people flagged for attack by a cybersurveillance software package called Pegasus.

The investigation that followed is the subject of Pegasus: The story of the world’s most dangerous spyware, a non-fiction thriller and a must-read for all, not just those interested in cryptography and communications. As the authors warn: “Regular civilians being targeted with military-grade surveillance weapons – against their will, against their knowledge, and with no recourse – is a dystopian future we really are careening toward if we don’t understand this threat and move to stop it.”

Pegasus offers a fascinating insight into how journalism is coping with a hyper-connected world. Eyewitnesses and whistle-blowers have better access than ever to sympathetic campaigning journalists worldwide. But this advantage is shared with the very governments, corporations and organised crime networks that want to silence them.

To drag Pegasus into the light, Richard’s ‘Forbidden Stories’ consortium choreographed the activities of more than 80 investigative journalists from 17 media organisations working across four continents and in eight languages. The consortium’s mission is to continue and publish the work of other journalists facing threats, prison or murder.

Its Pegasus investigation commenced in March 2021, knowing full well that it had to conclude by June that year. By then, NSO – the Israeli company that created Pegasus in 2016 – was bound to twig that its brainchild was being hacked.

The bigger the names linked by the consortium to that list of phone numbers, the harder it would be to keep the investigation under wraps. Early on, the name of a journalist called Jorge Carrasco cropped up. He led one of the consortium’s cross-border collaborations, which aimed to finish the investigations of murdered Mexican journalist Regina Martinez. Then things got silly: the names of half the French cabinet appeared. Then president Emmanuel Macron.

The narrative of Pegasus is a pulse-accelerating account that is never afraid to delve into well-crafted technical detail. The authors explain how Pegasus gains free rein on a mobile device without ever tipping off the owner to its presence. It turns out to have evolved out of software designed to serve consumers waiting in queues on tech support call lines.

Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie, two of the founders of NSO, cut their teeth developing programs that allowed support technicians to take charge of a caller’s phone.

Before long, a European intelligence service came calling. Eventually, Pegasus was sold to more than 60 clients in over 40 countries. It was the first software to give security services an edge over terrorists, criminal gangs and paedophiles – and over whistle-blowers, campaigners, political opponents, journalists and at least one Emirati princess struggling for custody of her children.

The book is detailed but it isn’t a diatribe against the necessary business of government surveillance and espionage. It is about how, in the contest between ordinary people and the powerful, software is tilting the field wildly in the latter’s favour.

The international journalistic collaboration that was the Pegasus Project sparked the biggest global surveillance scandal since Snowden. It led to a European Parliament inquiry into government spyware, legal action from major tech companies, government sanctions against NSO and countless individual legal complaints.

Yet, the authors spend little time sitting on their laurels. Demand for such systems is only growing. Certain governments are making offers to certain tech firms that add zeroes to the fees NSO once enjoyed. Nor do the authors expect much from the public debate sparked by their investigation: “The issues… might have been raised,” they concede, “but the solutions are not even in the works.”

– Pegasus by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud is published by Macmillan

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Books, Health, Medical, Research, Science

Book Review: A Silent Fire

THE FLAMES WITHIN

Intro: A fascinating primer explores the crucial role of inflammation in our bodies and how it can go awry. What you need to know about inflammation in the body

INFLAMMATION is a crucial tool of the body’s immune system. As the first line of defence against injury or invaders, it traps bacteria and viruses, heals wounds and signals to other cells for help. It results in symptoms such as pain and swelling. Once a threat is remedied, inflammation, along with its ensuing discomfort, disappears – or at least it should.

In her debut book A Silent Fire: The story of inflammation, diet and disease, gastroenterologist Shilpa Ravella explains how inflammatory responses can turn against us. Crucially, she shows how chronic inflammation plays a role in many common conditions such as heart disease and cancer, and why Western diets are at least partially to blame.

This primer sees Ravella start with some fascinating history, travelling all the way back to the 1st century, when Aulus Cornelius Celsus first described four of the five main signs of inflammation: pain, heat, redness and swelling. The fifth, a loss of function, was identified in the mid-1800s.

Ravella spends a lot of time examining the work of Victorian scientists, such as Élie Metchnikoff, who won a Nobel Prize in 1908 for discovering immune cells called phagocytes that engulf pathogens and particles. Eventually, she moves on to modern-day researchers like Charles Serhan, who helped identify molecules known as resolvins that turn off inflammation.

This lays a proper foundation for the book’s second section, which connects these discoveries to inflammation’s possible role in disease. Low levels of inflammation have been found in people with conditions such as cancer. While inflammation is a normal response to injury and disease, persistent inflammation is now being viewed as a potential cause of illness.

Ravella further speculates that inflammation can contribute to conditions like depression and Alzheimer’s disease, though as a responsible medical professional, she provides important caveats and stresses the need for more research.

The most damning evidence links inflammation to autoimmune conditions – which occur when the body damages its own cells – such as rheumatoid arthritis. Characterised by long-lasting, low levels of inflammation, these conditions increase susceptibility to other problems like bone loss, heart disease and kidney disease.

The book wraps up by detailing how factors like diet and exercise can contribute to inflammation as well as help dampen it. For many, this won’t be new, but what may be illuminating is Ravella’s explanation of lifestyle significance.

For instance, she devotes a whole chapter to the gut microbiome, describing how processed foods and animal products, like red meat and dairy, disrupt microbial composition, setting off a chain of events that leads to increased inflammation. She then explains why fruits, vegetables and whole grains can help undo these effects.

A Silent Fire is no quick read: it is packed with information, combining medical history, innovative research and first-hand clinical experiences. At times, it feels over-ambitious, as Ravella crams in as much as possible rather than clearly connecting the various topics. It can also be difficult to keep track of all the different microbes, scientists and immune cells involved, especially if you lack a scientific or medical background.

But Ravella’s writing style keeps even the most dense page engaging. She breathes life into biological function, at one point describing types of white blood cells as “sophisticated warriors” that “voraciously gobble up” particles. Ultimately, the book is perfect for those looking to delve deeper into the history and intricate workings of immunology, diet and disease.

– A Silent Fire is published by Bodley Head

– Rheumatoid arthritis, as shown in this X-ray, is a chronic inflammatory condition
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Arts, Books, History, Russia, Ukraine

Book Review: Overreach

RUSSIA-UKRAINE

Intro: Owen Matthews is a writer with close family ties to Russia, but a disturbing portrait of the Russian president’s propaganda is swallowed whole by his own people. The Russian despot’s lies are working. Overreach is the inside story of Putin’s war against Ukraine

READERS of foreign affairs’ news will know the name of Owen Matthews, a veteran Moscow correspondent, from articles and pieces he has written about Russia and Ukraine.

But his book on the war now raging between those two countries – an act of pure and vicious choice by President Putin – reveals for the first time the depth of his own family’s involvement in the complex background of conflicting national identities.

Or as he puts it: “We all like to believe that we think with our rational minds. But a little bit of us, a deep bit, thinks with our blood.” For Matthews’ mother, Lyudmila Bibikova, was born in Kharkiv, a predominately Russian-speaking city, at the heart of the Ukrainian territories Putin is determined to annex; and her own parents were both born in what is now, legally, Ukrainian land.

Yet as Matthews goes on to explain: “The Bibikov family did not consider themselves Ukrainian. For two centuries the Bibikovs played a significant role in Russia’s imperial role in Ukraine, first as servants of the Tsars and later as loyal lieutenants of Soviet power. Whether I like it or not my family history – my blood – is intimately linked not only to Ukraine and Russia but to the history of the Russian Empire.”

Although Putin is widely regarded as being highly motivated by a desire to reassemble the Soviet Union – and the secession of Ukraine in 1991 marked the end for the USSR – the Russian president sees himself as the heir to Catherine the Great, who brought most of Ukraine under the Kremlin’s rule.

And, as Matthews recounts, his ancestor, Captain Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bibikov, was “one of the Russian officers who accompanied the empress on her first imperial progress through the newly conquered lands of south and west Ukraine”.

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