The psychological toll of being constantly tracked and harassed

In late 2018 a Saudi journalist living in exile in Canada, who liked to work out in between recording YouTube critiques of his government, ordered some protein powder online. When a text message landed on Omar Abdulaziz’s smartphone notifying him of a DHL delivery, he clicked on it without hesitating.

The portrait Deibert paints is a million miles away from the Cold War binary world of John le Carré

The DHL invitation was fake digital bait. By clicking on it, Abdulaziz had enabled Pegasus, a spyware program designed by a now infamous Israeli company, NSO Group. It proceeded to hoover up his emails, contacts, photos and WhatsApp exchanges, which included discussions of a plan he was hatching with a friend to distribute SIM cards to supporters willing to take on Saudi Arabia’s ruler on social media. Abdulaziz is convinced that those eavesdropped conversations are the reason why his friend Jamal Khashoggi was killed and dismembered in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul by an execution squad dispatched from Riyadh, while his fiancée waited forlornly outside.

The story is just one of many in Chasing Shadows that will chill the blood of any journalist, human rights worker or civil society activist. Or, come to think of it, any ordinary citizen who believes that criticising your own government does not merit extra-judicial execution, and that private communications should remain private. Abdulaziz only learnt of his inadvertent role in Khashoggi’s murder thanks to the Citizen Lab, a digital forensics laboratory based at the University of Toronto. It is the creation of Ronald J. Deibert, ‘a working-class street kid from a hardscrabble East Vancouver neighbourhood’, who has dedicated his career to exposing international cyber espionage. His account makes for an utterly gripping, petrifying read.