Rachel Maddow warned MSNBC viewers Monday of the Trump administration’s quiet embrace of new spyware technology that she said “turns your own phone into a spy against you.”
“It probably should come as no surprise that the Trump administration is trying to give themselves all sorts of new, very intrusive powers against American citizens,” Maddow said at the top of the Monday segment.
The “Rachel Maddow Show” host went on to detail how the Trump administration has begun working with a company known for the same kind of spyware technology that was reportedly used by the Saudi government to track, kidnap and kill Washington Post columnist and Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.
The technology in question reportedly infects its target’s phone without them realizing it or clicking on anything. Once a person’s device has been infected with it, Maddow explained, the spyware’s controller gets access to everything on the device and sees everything it is used for. The device’s microphone and camera can be turned on without its owner even realizing it.
“This technology has been sitting on the table like a loaded gun, waiting for a would-be dictator to come to power in America and use it against us,” Maddow explained. “When this kind of spyware surveillance tool emerged as a favored weapon for authoritarian governments and murderous dictatorships around the world, the Joe Biden administration banned the U.S. government from ever using that particular spyware or anything like it.”
Maddow revealed, however, that the Trump administration has reversed that ban.
“Which part of the Trump administration is using it? ICE,” Maddow said. “Are they using it just against immigrants? Yeah, right. As if.” You can watch the full segment yourself in the video below.
Maddow noted that ICE plans to reportedly use its new spyware technology to investigate not only undocumented immigrants but also networks of anti-ICE protesters. It is additionally unclear whether or not ICE is even getting warrants before it deploys.
“This turns your own phone into a spy against you,” Maddow reiterated. “This is a surveillance capability I have been laying awake at night thinking about for the past couple of years. Now, Trump is in power and Americans are protesting against him every single day of the week and twice on Sundays, and so, naturally, he is happily signing the contracts that give his government this power.”
“He is handing this power to the most untrained, most lawless, most aggressive pseudo-military parts of his government to use against American citizens, without warrants and without us being notified that it’s happening,” Maddow concluded. “What are they going to do to us with this stuff? And what do we do about it?”
