David Vincenzetti

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Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy by Laurent Richard, Sandrine Rigaud

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He was fluent in Spanish, had lived in Mexico off and on for almost ten years, and had contacts in high places. Antonio’s offer to make introductions to family friends among the local officialdom, like the head of security in one Mexican state and the head of a European consulate in another, drew a personal shout-out from the company CEO back in Milan. “You are on the team!” wrote David Vincenzetti. This was an especially welcome note because Vincenzetti was something of a legend in the cybercommunity, a hacker’s hacker, a self-styled cypherpunk who had helped develop and perfect the cryptography that served as the early bulwark of privacy on the internet. Vincenzetti had been a partner in three successful cybersecurity firms before he was thirty-five, and then turned to cybersurveillance.

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A way to monitor bad actors on the internet as they coordinated potentially deadly plots. “Privacy is very important,” Vincenzetti would say, “but national security is much more important.” National security professionals agreed! Ten years in, Vincenzetti had made Hacking Team the premier private cybersurveillance vendor in the world. David Vincenzetti looked the part of predator, lean and alert, with a hint of wiry sinew beneath his slim-fit designer suits, like a hunter who could stalk for days before striking. Vincenzetti claimed to rise at 3 a.m. most days so he could get in a little exercise before he started his workday. He carried himself with the air of a winner but also of a prodigy, and a seer.

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On that day, instead, a memo went out to the Hacking Team announcing Antonio’s departure from the company. They wished him “all the best for his future career” but had already put in the works a nondisclosure agreement for his signature. Yeah, you can leave, kiddo, but keep your trap shut. * * * DAVID VINCENZETTI AND his management team adhered to the simple and straightforward economic formula that prevails in business these days: a corporation’s sole purpose is to maximize shareholder profits. Period. Ethical worries were beside the point. When one of Hacking Team’s exploit developers suggested that perhaps they should be more careful about vetting their end users, a company executive shut him down.

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

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Though Hacking Team billed its tools as “untraceable,” Citizen Lab’s researchers were able to reverse-engineer and trace its spyware back to servers located in dictatorships around the world. This wasn’t data buried on some website. I’d covered the discoveries on the front pages of the Times. And I’d always made a point to reach out to Hacking Team’s Italian executives for comment. The company’s chief executive, David Vincenzetti, was emphatic that Hacking Team went to “great lengths” to ensure that its spyware was used only for criminal and terrorism investigations and never sold to governments “blacklisted by European countries, the U.S., NATO or any repressive regimes for that matter.” Vincenzetti said his firm had even set up a board—comprised of engineers and human rights lawyers—with veto power over any sale.