On November 20, 2024, Max released 'Surveilled', which has earned rave reviews from critics. "SURVEILLED tracks Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ronan Farrow as he investigates the growing business of commercial spyware, following the story from New York City to Tel Aviv, Israel, a center of espionage cybertechnology. Once a target of covert surveillance himself, Farrow explores the multi-billion-dollar industry, addressing the contradictory uses and implications of phone hacking -- the ability to monitor criminal activity and the attendant threats to civil liberties." But what did the critics say?
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| Photo by Fairuz Naufal Zaki on Unsplash |
Jason Bailey of
RogerEbert.com says, "It's happened to just about anyone who spends at least part of their day on their phone: that peculiar moment when you open up a social media app and find yourself staring at a targeted ad for something you haven't shopped for or even searched for, but mentioned casually to a friend or partner. That's odd, you might think, and then (perhaps after ordering the item in question), you move on, choosing not to grapple with the implications of this transaction. It's just too chilling to consider that the phones are listening.Yet the new HBO documentary "Surveilled" informs us that they are doing just that, and the consequences are far more dire than runaway online shopping. The directors are Matthew O'Neill and Perri Peltz; the producer and star is Ronan Farrow, who immersed himself in the world of digital spyware for the "New Yorker." The primary focus of his investigation was Pegasus, developed by the Israeli private commercial spyware company the NSO Group; they sell Pegasus primarily to governments, which in turn (per his reporting) use the software to target journalists, activists, dissidents, and politicians." Adding, "Farrow's investigation is exhaustive, spanning two years and several continents. He travels to Tel Aviv, taking his cameras into the NSO Group headquarters, where he voices his sensible moral concerns to various spokespeople, who give him carefully-prepared responses about "all the good work" that they do. He gets more useful information from that former employee, who left the company (along with many others) after the 2018 murder of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi—an ambush made possible by Pegasus software. In a phone call captured by the documentary crew, Farrow's contact at NSO asks him to share which of their former employees he spoke with. (He, of course, protects his source.)At least 45 countries use Pegasus, we're told, and it's not just autocrats and dictators; Western democracies are using spyware too, most of them under a veil of secrecy. "We live in a time where there's obvious, well-documented democratic backsliding," explains Ron Deibert of the Citizen Lab in Toronto, which is doing much of the investigation and exposure of this technology. "Authoritarian practices are spreading worldwide. I firmly believe the surveillance industry, unchecked as it is, is one of the major contributing factors to those trends." And this is the structural masterstroke of "Surveilled," because Farrow and directors O'Neill and Peltz understand that it's one thing for us to shake our heads at the targeting of journalists and activists in the UAE or even in Spain, but when the threat becomes a direct one to the viewer, as it does in the last 20 minutes or so, we sit upright. It's not just that employees of the United States government working abroad have been hacked by Pegasus; the NSO group pitched law enforcement agencies on a Pegasus-like software before the company was placed on an export blacklist in 2021, and many such agencies were unsurprisingly receptive to the idea. In March of 2023, the Biden administration issued an executive order prohibiting government agencies from purchasing foreign spyware, "but it's not a blanket ban on the purchase of all spyware," Farrow explains, noting that mere days later, we joined several other countries in a joint statement vowing to explore the use of this technology — but responsibly."
Stephen Silver of The SS Ben Hecht writes, "It’s a fascinating subject and is presented compellingly. But it also feels more like a commercial for a New Yorker article that was already published." Concluding, "Plus, I’m still sort of upset that we never got a movie adaptation of Catch and Kill, Farrow’s memoir about his time investigating Harvey Weinstein, and one of the most cinematic nonfiction books I’ve ever read." Photo by Fairuz Naufal Zaki on Unsplash
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