User Profile

The book takes as its starting point the arrests of Lori Vallow ("doomsday mom" as the media and social media started calling her) and her accomplice Chad Daybell, and follows the thread of Apocalypse-obsessed fringe LDS groups. Both are currently awaiting trial and facing the death penalty for a bunch of murders that include two of Lori's children, her ex-husband, and Chad's wife. What makes this book especially interesting is that it's not just a true crime reporting but it incorporates the context of what makes these weird "the end is nigh" offshoots of LDS actually not so much bizarre deviations but logical extensions. In other words, the fringe is not so much the fringe as slightly off-center. In addition, these cultish LDS groups overlap quite a bit with other similarly cultish groups: anti-government / anti-tax sovereign citizen-types, Q (of course), and white nationalists. As the author notes, "At the heart of what happened is an ecosystem of extremism: extreme preppers arming up for the end of the world, extreme Mormons who focus only on the “latter-day” part of their church’s name." So this cannot be dismissed as the doings of deranged individuals.

The journalists who wrote this book did for cybersurveillance, what the Panama Papers investigation did for wealthy tax cheats. In both cases, a consortium of journalists got a treasure trove of data from an anonymous source and went to work with fellow reporters around the world. In the case of Pegasus, we are talking about the software sold by Israeli company NSO to governments. Pegasus, once it infects someone's phone, can basically access all the data, media, contacts. It can also turn on the phone mic and camera and record private conversations. NSO advertised it as designed to thwart terrorist and criminal organizations, but of course, Pegasus was used to by questionable governments (Morocco, Mexico, Azerbaijan, India, among others) to spy on journalists, political opponents, human right activists... and Jamal Khashoggi (and his wife, fiancee, and son), but also heads of state (such as Macron and almost his entire cabinet). The book is the breathless race from the Forbidden Stories reporters (and their associates from other newspapers) and well as Amnesty International's Security Lab technicians to figure out what the data they received meant, design a tool to determine whether or not a phone had been infected by Pegasus, ascertain the identities of the victims of Pegasus, and do all this without leaks before the official release of the stories written based on the data. It is riveting. And yet, while NSO took a major hit when the stories were published, the Pegasus clients pretty much got away with it and no significant legislations were passed to protect us from unwarranted (and creepy) cybersurveillance. There are a lot of NSO-type companies out there and not much to stop them.