 Hello and welcome to NewsClick's International Roundup where we are joined by Prabir Pukhayasta. In today's episode we first go to Brazil where ex-president Lula has been released. Next we revisit the Pegasus hacking issue and finally we go to Syria for an update. So Prabir firstly going to Brazil. Ex-president Lula de Silva has been released from prison up to 580 days. Of course the case isn't over yet, it's still going on. But can you tell us about the developments in this case and what this release means? Really narrowly this didn't come up as a direct consequence of the Lula case. This came up because there is a Supreme Court judgment in Brazil that those who are still appealing their convictions, they should not be put in jail but they should be free till the final appeal is decided. By this Lula's entire incarceration, his entire jail period is actually legally wrong. So that's been the larger issue which doesn't only relate to Lula but to probably something like 5,000 prisoners in Brazilian jails who have been denied this right to appeal pending which they have been put in jail. So this is one part of it. The second part of it, I don't think this is to be seen in isolation from what happened earlier, about 3-6 months back. We have had a series of leaks which talked about, which actually disclosed that Judge Moro, who was supposedly the hero of the Car Wash campaign or the Lava Jyoth campaign, that he was involved in a judicial impropriety, that he was actually conniving with the prosecutors. While being a judge, he should not have been playing that role. And those conversations have been made public. And after this conversation and messages became public, it also showed that the Brazilian judiciary was not participating in this Car Wash campaign. Mainly because it is corruption, they had a definite agenda or parts of the Brazilian judiciary specifically Judge Moro had an agenda which was to fix Lula so that he would not be able to contest against whoever would be the right-wing candidate and therefore make it possible for a right-wing victory in the elections. So this is really targeting Lula. That was clear from all the conversations which had been leaked. I suspect the Brazilian judiciary also reacted to this. So instead of directly pronouncing on Lula's case, they have pronounced the general verdict because they also want to show, at least for themselves, that the judiciary is above reproach. And Judge Moro's, all these conversations being leaked coming in public domain has actually meant a huge blow to the credibility of the Brazilian judiciary itself. So I think a part of it was to recoup from that, recover from that. But the consequence is a big victory for the left, the working class politics which Lula represented in Brazil and a definite defeat for Bolsonaro and company who have come in only because Lula was disqualified. If there was an election which Lula had been able to contest and this judgment now makes clear that's what should have been the legal position. You cannot condemn somebody without the final appeal being heard, which means that he was technically innocent till the final appeal was heard. Then he should have been able to contest for presidency. And if you take all that into account, I think it's a huge victory for the Brazilian democracy today. And it definitely a defeat for all those forces who tried to keep Lula out of the electoral fray and handed over Brazil to the right wing. And I think in that sense is constitutional coups which is what the United States has been pioneering in Latin America. I think this certainly has seen a defeat. And our next issue today is the Pegasus hackings. So it has been over a week since the news broke that WhatsApp was used to hack into phones through NSO groups Pegasus. And one aspect of this which has not been talked about as much as that government officials were also hacked in over 20 countries. So can you tell us about this aspect? Let's look at what NSO is and what Pegasus software or Pegasus tools do. NSO comes out of the Israeli military intelligence. In fact, the people involved in it, the kind of access it has seems to show it was very close to the Israeli military. We have seen this in the United States as well. There are specific companies which seem to work very closely with the security established in the United States. Israeli military intelligence has a special role. It also aids the United States by passing its own legal restraint which exists what it can or cannot do against you as citizens. GCHQ and Israeli military intelligence are the two bodies which work very closely as we know from the Iranian case where the virus which was used to hack into the centrifuges in Iran. So it was shown later that this appeared to be a joint project of the US and the Israeli military. So this comes out of Israeli military, the NSO. And it's a shadowy company. We don't know who really the owners are. It seems to have interlocking directors that one company owns another company which is again owned by the original company. So we don't know what this shell company's who real owners of these are. It's quite conceivable Israeli government is actually involved in the ownership as well. So this is really a part of a particular hacker for a higher company as it is known that they give this hacking tools to others for money. They have claimed they give it only to governments. So we don't know how true or not that claim is. What the borders apparently of this company was to give the suit of tools. But it was licensed and it was also using the servers which they had to deploy. They could deploy it on behalf of their clients or the clients could have also used the servers that NSO had set up for them. So this operates by hacking into our smartphones or any other computing device which is on the internet using different mechanisms. In this particular case, what we talked about is the Pegasus tools or the hacking tool hacked into the smartphones by using WhatsApp. So if you had a call from WhatsApp, even if you didn't answer it, it had discovered what is called the zero defect in the system, WhatsApp software. Which allowed it to then plant its malware code into the smartphone itself. And once it is planted in the phone, that means end to end encryption that WhatsApp and Facebook claim is no longer applicable because you actually have access to the phone. And once you have access to the phone, then it was possible for the malware to what is called exfiltrate. It means send the files, whatever is there, contacts, messages, images, everything of the phone out to a Pegasus server. Which as I said would be set up by NSO with the client or directly by the NSO and supplied the information supplied to the client. This is the modus operandi of what this hack was. But this is not the only tool that they had, this is not the only hack they had. They apparently hacked iPhone, they hacked other systems also. So there's a whole bunch of hacks which are available with Pegasus, within the Pegasus toolkit. And this is only one of them because this has now come to light. Let's not think that this is something which is the only thing that happened. There are other suits also that could be still active today. The second part of it is that once it is hacked, it is actually your phone which has been hacked. It is not WhatsApp which has been hacked, it's your phone which has been hacked. That was the security hole which was used to hack your phones. Once our phones have been hacked, can they be ever made free of the infection? We don't know because actually it can go deep down into the operating system. It's quite possible that unless we change the phone that we will not be free of the infection. So 1400 known cases means at least 1400 phones today are actually possibly useless for their owners or compromised for their owners. So they might have to replace all these phones. So this is a huge damage to the people that have been done. And also we don't know how many more have been infected. There's only once that Citizen's Lab in Canada has told us. But there could be many more which are there and you can see from the colour of the Citizen's Lab case that they have published that you can see there are multiple players who are clients of NSO because there are different regions in which the colours are there. The 45 countries are grouped in different regions. Of course, a large number of reds belong to the countries that Saudi Arabia was interested in and it's clear for instance Qatar, Syria, all these countries are Saudi targets. Of course, Iran is not a target because Iran doesn't have WhatsApp and Facebook. China is not a target because it doesn't have WhatsApp and Facebook. So those were protected by the fact that these were not there. But if you look at all of this, you see US for instance, you see South Africa, you see Brazil, they are obviously more players than just Saudi Arabia in the picture. So this has been sold to a number of countries and the fact that 20 countries' governments you talked about, this is really governments actually hacking each other's officials. That's what it really is that WhatsApp officials were hacked. So 20 countries' government officials hacked each other's phones with the support of the Pegasus tools or essentially NSO. The last point I would like to make what people are forgetting that these 20 governments are buying Pegasus software. They may think they are the recipients of the information but that information goes back to NSO. NSO is very close to the Israel military intelligence if not a part of it and this also goes to the sharing agreement it has with the United States. So what we are doing, for instance, if we take India, which is 140 such cases and the suspicion is it is one of the government agencies which have bought the software, it's either NTRO, it's either CIB, CBI, or it is RO, which doesn't operate under the Home Ministry. Though they have one of these agencies could have bought the software, certainly in all other countries we are talking about it is probably the, not certainly, but probably the government agencies who have bought the software. So what they are doing is while spying on their citizens, which is what they have been interested, they have been doing or spying on other countries' officials, what they are doing is also helping all this information to go to Israel and the United States. So that is the flip side of it. Countries like India who think that this is only helping their agencies, the security agencies to get certain kinds of information. They are not realizing, they are also supplying this information straight off to also other countries and whether any security agencies should be procuring such software from third countries is I think a huge security issue. Let's, I would also say, let's be very clear, these are not hacking tools. These are essentially weaponized software. They essentially are cyber weapons. And finally in Syria, we now know that Russian and Turkish troops have begun joint patrol in the northern border areas of Syria and the US has now agreed to deploy, approved deployment of troops in the oil fields in their resort where the oil fields are located and Trump has also openly declared that the US is staying there for the oil. So can you tell us about these developments? Let's look at the northern border, which I think is the more critical strategic issue. Which side will Turkey be? Which side will the Kurds be? And how will Russia and Syria negotiate between the Kurds and the Turkish forces which are poised to fight each other? And of course Turkey has a military advantage as we know. Looking at the Kobane and the Haqsa area that this have been taken over really by the Syrian Arab army, the Syrian government forces. And there they along with the Russians are patrolling the border with Turkey. So they have protected Kobane. They have protected the eastern part of the northern border. So that is where a bulk of the Kurdish population is. And this always had some presence in the eastern side. The government always had some presence over there. But this is now expanded so that that part of it hasn't gone to Turkey. There is a middle portion which is really from Rasul Al Ain to near Kobane. That whole border which is there, Manbij and all these areas. That seems to be at the moment still fluid. The Turkish aided forces, we will not call them Turkish forces. They are what used to be called the Syrian National Army. This is the part which was close to the Turkish government. The Free Syrian Army was aided big time by the Americans as we know. And we also find that the US support that was given out of I think 24 groups. 21 were very close to the Al Qaeda or to Tahir el-Sham or to various other jihadi what is called the jihadi forces. What we have been calling the Islamist extremist forces. So these groups are the one Turkey has banded together to find the Kurds. They are trying to enter into this area. And there still seems to be some element of question mark. How that area which is at the moment being shown in a different color on our map. You can see that that area is still not clear where it will go. But it does seem that Turkish troops are supporting this but they really not doing the fighting. So it is something that still we need to see how it develops. But it is appearing that the US does not have too much of a role on this. The Kurds and the Syrian government seem to have had some real approach mark. It also appears that Russia has been able to contain the Turkish forces not to intervene militarily directly in Syria. So that's a northern border which I think strategically is what is important. Rest is when you come to the eastern side east of Euphrates. That whole area it's a sparsely populated area but yes it has some river basin. So it has some grain production and further down it has an oil producing area where the oil wells are. Now those oil wells if the United States wants to grab them the amount of money they'll have to spend to position their troops there will be more than what they will get out of the oil. So I don't think strategically it makes much sense. This is all I would say Twitter campaign that Trump is doing to say that he's still getting something out of it. I don't think in the long run the Kurds see any way of trying to retain this area. These are really Arab areas. They're not Kurdish populated areas. So they're Arab areas. I don't think the Kurdish forces would like to be there after having the US handing them over virtually to Turkey and they're being saved right now by the Syrian government and the Russians. So I don't think that's going to be a long term solution for them and gifting Syria's oil to the Kurds. I don't think the Kurds have any stake in that either. So I do feel that this is a transient issue. Once the northern border, northern border gets settled, Idlib gets settled, I think this will be negotiated and settled. This is just Trump's bit of grandstanding to save face after his what has been regarded widely as his abandonment of the Kurds and the betrayal of the United States of the Kurds. As we know, the Kurds have repeatedly been betrayed by the United States and other forces. So they certainly if they did not anticipate it, they would have been very stupid. And I do believe that the Kurds have kept their lines of communication open via the Russians to the Syrian government. So that is why this transition of this nature was possible. So I do think that this is the eastern side of it that we are talking about is also going to change, but it's going to take a lot of little time. And for the Syrian government, the more important is the northern border and of course Idlib where there is still a sizable section of extremist forces which are there, which they need to address. And we still have an open question, what role Turkey is playing because Baghdadi seems to have been very close to the Turkish border. And some of his family members seem to have journeyed through Turkey in order to reach him. So there is still an open question. What was Turkey doing? Was there protecting Baghdadi? Was it, there was a tacit still understanding between the extremist in Idlib and Turkey? Those are open questions. So I think Idlib poses at the moment the bigger issue for the Syrian government. And what happens to Turkey and Syria will depend much more on Idlib than it is going to depend on now, on the northern side or the eastern side. So thank you for joining us today. And that is all the time we have in today's episode. Keep watching NewsClick.