so the most modern forms of spyware that we should all be most concerned about can hijack your phone undetectably turn it into a listening device turn on the microphone turn on the camera and disgorge all your personal content and send it remotely to whoever is operating the technology so the core thing to know is that for a long time this has been used as a tool of Oppression under dictatorships autocracies we see it show up on the phones of people around murdered dissidents journalists it's been linked to hundreds of acts of violence around the world
but what I've been tracking in recent years of my reporting is that in one Western democracy after another countries that supposedly have protections against these kinds of intrusions in their bodies of law we're also seeing scandals in which this kind of surveillance technology is overused we've seen it happen in Poland in Greece in Spain and a lot of this documentary surveilled is actually set in Spain where we document one of the largest clusters on record of peaceful Civil Society members and opposition politicians being hacked in this way and I can tell you Michelle from my
own experience being followed around surveilled in various ways including sometimes high-tech ways where someone was following me tracking my GPS data it is not just information gathering it is intimidation and it shrinks the space for opposition expression of all kinds so it's something we should all just be really concerned about and the film shows that not just opposition politicians and activists but innocent bystanders apolitical people are caught up in this all the time [Music]
